Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The M5 Pro Xtreme has, to say the least, got one hell of a competitive price point. In the UK, the the 256GB SKU as seen here is available from Overclockers UK for a shade over £185 whilst in the US Newegg stock the drive for $214.99 and in Germany prices of €200 are seen on Amazon.de

Overview

In Plextor’s early years when optical media was all the rage, those who took the plunge and paid that little bit more for their drives and media were rewarded with items that not only offered, but also gave the results that they promised. From my first look at a Plextor SSD, it seems that this same high level of quality and care has been passed through and the M5 Pro Xtreme is pinnacle of their SSD lineup at this moment in time.

When the SATA 6Gbps standard was introduced, it was said that the new standard was going to be future-proof for a good period of time, however we have quickly seen that virtually all of the big SSD vendors have hit the upper limits of what the SATA III interface can handle and now is the time to start tweaking and tuning the drives to squeeze out every last bit of performance to try to make one drive that bit better than another in one way or another.

The Xtreme SKU of the M5 is just one example of how vendors are refining their drives. By using extra NAND packages that even themselves have been refined, we see quite a notable gain in performance at the 4K level, even more so as the queue depth is increased and when this drive is used for an operating system, this performance is going to be more noticeable.

Now when its comes to the price per performance mark, Plextors M5 Pro Xtreme is not one of the cheapest drives on the market, but in my eyes, this is one heck of a drive to consider and when you think about it, almost every aspect of this drives performance has been taken up as high as it can go for now, until Plextor bring out the M6 later this year. So all in all, if you want a drive that not only ‘looks’ good on paper but also gives you epic levels of real-world performance as well, then do it we used to in the good ol’ days and pay that little extra and reap the benefits in the long run.

Pros:

• Dual core controller
• Latest generation of Toshiba NAND
• Strong 4K performance
• Read and write speeds close to the limits of SATA 6Gbps interface.

Cons:

• Slight premium over other top performance 256GB SSDs

“Back in the mid-90’s Plextor was regarded as one of the best out there when it came to optical drives and media. Coming forward to today and their line of M-series SSDs and it is clear that the same passion for quality and performance has been brought forward in to the next century. The M5 Pro Xtreme is worthy of its own name as it takes performance at virtually every level as far as it can possibly go – this drive has some serious performance to give.”

Thanks to Plextor for providing this review sample.