Plextor M6M 256GB mSATA SSD Review
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-4770K Gigabyte Z87X-UD7 TH (Z87 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 4400 8GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Plextor M6M (256GB) SanDisk Extreme II (480GB) Samsung SSD 840 EVO (250GB) Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA (500GB) OCZ Vertex 460 (240GB) |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64 Intel 9.4.0.1027, iRST 12.8.0.1016 DirectX 11 Intel HD 10.18.10.33 Benchmarks Used: IOMeter 1.1.0 RC HD Tune v5.50 ATTO v2.47 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64 PCMark 7 SiSoftware Sandra 2014 |
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As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.
The Plextor M6M 256GB drive drive put up some excellent numbers in our IOMeter testing. At lower queue depths, the drive performed about in the middle of the pack, but as the workload increased, the Plextor drive pulled ahead and finished at or near the top.
In terms of total bandwidth, the Plextor M6M 256GB drive offered the highest performance with out custom workstation access patters, and also performed well in the fully random 4K test.
