Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe 256GB SSD Review

Final Thoughts

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Pricing

The Plextor M6e Black Edition is a first-class premium product, there is absolutely no doubt about it. Premium however also carries a price tag and this drive will most likely not come cheap, or will it? We do not have an official pricing at the time of review, but an estimated guess would be slightly below £1.00 per GB of storage. I could find a single Dutch retailer listing the drive for €280.00, but that’s it. We will have to be a little more patient on that area, but we will update with the information as soon as we have them.

Conclusion

Let us start with the pure aesthetics of this drive. The Plextor M6e Black Edition is a beauty, there is absolutely no doubt about that. The black PCB has just as a superb finish as the black coating on the cover and bracket. The red heatsink in the middle stands out and not only helps to keep the SSD cool, but also looks pretty sexy.

Some people might argue that adding a cooler like this to an SSD is overkill and only for the looks, but it does serve its purpose in many situations. Think of cases with generally bad airflow, for one reason or another. Or situations where the SSD will be nudged between two high-powered graphics cards that produce a lot of heat. Those are the situations where the M6e Black Edition will stand out and stay cool.

The card is generally well designed and the PCB has an additional SATA power connector in case your PCIe slot can’t deliver enough power. This ensures that your SSD will perform optimally even in those situations. The Half-Height, Half-Length card would also be suitable for use in SFF enclosures.

When moving to the PCI Express bus, we eliminate the speed limitations that otherwise happen on the SATA 3.0 ports. We saw impressive transfer speeds of up to 780MB/s while reading and 600MB/s while writing. The card’s performance is further aided by a 0.04ms access time.

The PlexTurbo software is amazing and better than ever before in the new version 2.0. It managed to push transfer speeds up and above 6000MB/s. The performance depends a lot on your setup and memory, that’s a given. Since my memory is running on 1333MHz at the time of testing and the Xeon CPU only has 1.8GHz, the speeds could be a better with other hardware. I highly recommend any PlextTurbo owner with 8GB or more RAM to use this tool, the benefits are amazing and something you’ll notice for sure.

Pros

• Looks great
• Impressive speeds up to 780MB/s
• Increased cooling ability
• PlexTurbo 2.0 software

Cons

• Price could be a factor

Neutral

• LEDs might be to bright for some people in some setups, but that is a matter of taste

“Plextor took their already great M6e PCIe SSD and improved upon it with a stylish new design and with improved cooling capabilities. The PlexTurbo 2.0 software further increases the value of the Plextor M6e Black Edition and takes its transfer speeds to a whole new level.”

Thanks to Plextor for providing us with this sample