Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB Solid State Drive Review

AS SSD

The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1GB file respectively. With most of the benchmark tests showing peak performance from an SSD, I’ve changed AS SSD a little to now give us a clearer picture as to how the drive will perform given variable levels of file compression.

Unlike SandForce controllers which suffer from low levels of performance when working with incompressible data, Marvell’s controller is more than capable of stepping up to the mark. Sequentially we see that the read performance its at its peak almost all the way through our compression test whilst write performance fluctuates up and down a little as the level of compression is increased, although it does stay at a fairly consistent level.