Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review

Name: Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review
Brand: Plextor

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, May 05, 2014, 12:39 PM EDT

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.

The Plextor M6M mSATA 256GB SSD - Find It @ Amazon

Plextor M6M mSATA Solid State Drives

Specifications & Features

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.

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.

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.

Tags: SSD, Storage, mSATA, Plextor, M6M

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com