Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB Solid State Drive Review

A Closer Look

The M5 Pro Xtreme doesn’t have a design which one may refer to as ‘extreme’ or performance driven, but instead one that could be referred to as sleek, simple and in my eyes – rather nice. The drive has a brushed metal finish and to the top right a simple bit of branding.

On the underside of the drive, things are a little more busy, but this means the clean and refined looks on the top are possible. From the label we note that this is a 256GB drive and it runs on the latest v1.05 firmware which gives some small performance tweaks to the read and write speeds of smaller file sizes.

Opening up the drive and taking a look inside (NOTE: Opening your drive will VOID your warranty) the all metal casing, we note on the lower half a small heat pad to help cool the controller through to the outside of the drive.

Placing the drive case aside and looking at the PCB, we find a rather busy upper side to the PCB with eight NAND packages, the drive controller and two DRAM packages for caching and buffering of data as it is read and written from/to the drive.

As mentioned at the start of the review, Plextor use Toshiba’s TH58TEG7DDJTA20 19nm toggle flash MLC NAND packages for both the M5 Pro and Xtreme variants of the drive, the only difference being that this model has sixteen NAND packages whilst this drives little brother has only eight packages at its disposal.

The Marvell controller is what makes this drive a little more interesting over some earlier 6Gbps SSDs in general. Whilst many drives still use a single core controller to process data, Plextor use one of Marvell’s third-generation dual-dore 88SS9187-BLD2 which support the latest SATA 3.1 standard, a sequential write speed of ~500MB/s, up to 1GB of DRAM and on-chip RAID allowing for the failure of individual blocks, planes, dies or entire packages of NAND before the worst case scenario that the drive itself fails.

To accompany the Marvell controller we find two NANYA NT5CB128M16HP-CG DRAM packages that add up to 512MB in total.

On the underside of the PCB, the additional eight NAND packages for the Xtreme model are in place which give this particular SKU a total of 256GB of RAW storage.