Plextor M6V SSD (1TB) & PlexTurbo Review

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our SSD’s slightly different depending upon the drive’s marketed purpose, that of a consumer or an enterprise focused SSD.  For a consumer SSD, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Benchmarks for our consumer tests are that of fresh drives, so that we can verify that the manufacturer’s specifications match the SSD. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your SSD is top-notch.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software used for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD and PCMark Vantage.  In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO 6.2.1

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

As seen from The SSD Review, this screenshot gives us an insight as to what the Plextor M6V has to offer. Prior to the extensive and multiple hours of testing placed onto the Plextor M6V, this is how the drive was received. Really what we are looking for here is that the drive has SMART attributes and is TRIM equipped.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

Here is our first benchmark, which looks a little odd when compared with it’s non-caching counterpart. Our skewed visualization is due to the enabled caching, and consistent data transfer performance is not as consistent as with normal SATA 3 testing.

With that being said, without PlexTurbo enabled the M6V reached up to 561MB/s read and 355MB/s write. With it enabled, it reached up 3.1GB/s write and 4.0GB/s. Take a look at the 128KB transfer, the write was only 54MB/s, yet the red came in at 711MB/s. Sure speeds appear jaw-dropping, but as we have said before the consistency is pretty much thrown out of the window.