Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review
Introduction and Specifications
The near-constant influx of new solid state storage solutions has shown no signs of letting up. In the last few weeks alone, we have looked at new drives from Micron/Crucial, ADATA, Intel, Samsung, OCZ and SanDisk, and today we’re going to cover something a little different from Plextor, the new M6M series.
Plextor’s M6M series of products are mSATA-based drives, designed for mobile devices or small form factor systems. These new drives are the follow-up to last year’s popular M5M series, though the M6M series is built around a newer controller and NAND flash memory.
The Plextor M6M series’ full list of features and specifications are listed below, followed by some pics of the drive and some more detail. A full suite of benchmarks is available on the pages ahead, of course.
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The Plextor M6M mSATA 256GB SSD - Find It @ Amazon
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Plextor’s new M6M series of mSATA solid state drives are based on the popular dual-core Marvell 88SS9188 controller and offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 520MB/s for reads and up to 440MB/s writes. Plextor also claims random reads of up to 94K IOPS and write speeds up to 80K IOPS at 4K, according to the drives’ specifications.
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As you can see, the Plextor M6M looks like most other mSATA devices, with its standard edge connector and diminutive PCB. Look a little deeper and you’ll the aforementioned Marvell controller, along with some Toshiba synchronous Toggle NAND flash memory and a bit of DRAM. The 256GB drive you see here is outfitted with 512MB of DDR3 cache memory, though the total amount of cache varies depending on the capacity of the drive, from 128MB on the 64GB drive, all the way up to 768MB for the 512GB drive.
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The Plextor M6M series also features custom Plextor firmware to ensure maximum sustained performance and data integrity. The drive supports TRIM and idle garbage collection and leverages 128-bit error correction code to ensure the accuracy of written data. The drive also use the AES-validated Marvell controller to provide secure 256-bit full-drive encryption.
