Plextor M6e 512GB PCI Express Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At this moment in time the new M6 line of drives are not yet available to buy and pricing is still yet to be confirmed. This said however, taking the factor of a new type of drive into account and the performance that is on offer, I would expect to see this drive retailing in the region of $800-1000USD800-1000USD / £500-600 in the UK. Once we do get final word of the pricing structure in the UK and the US, I will be sure to add this into the review along with a chart showing the price per GB against other drives.

Overview

Getting past the limitations of the SATA III interface has been the dream of many enthusiasts for quite some time now and whilst there are options such as RAID0 that can result in double or triple the performance of a single drive, there are obvious drawbacks such as data integrity and overall cost. The M6e eliminates the cost factor with a controller that can supply more than 1200MB/s of throughput and two lanes of PCIe pipeline straight to the CPU and also offers the ability to mount the M.2 SSD directly to a motherboard where compatible; although at this time motherboards that are M.2 compatible such as the Asus ROG boards only offer one PCIe lane thus limiting the performance of the drive back to SATA III levels.

Looking at the performance of the drive as a whole, we are looking at a controller and NAND that persists to give as much as it can throughout its life time, with NAND wear and available space not holding the M6e back. Granted there is a dip in the random read performance, but this is expected from any drive and should not be a major factor to take into consideration when looking to buy one of these drives.

When choosing one of these drives to use in a new system build, the key area where users will notice a key difference in speed is with the M6e set as the boot drive. With the sequential and 4K speeds far greater than SATA, boot times will be quicker and the time to open programs will also be reduced. Whilst this drive can also be used as a secondary storage device, having the higher performance will have a difference in the speed which data is accessed, however to the user the advantage will not be as notable as it would be as a boot drive.

The only additional feature that I would have like to see included with the drive is a half height PCI back plate, making the drive compatible with a wider range of chassis and SFF builds.

The NGFF generation of drives are certainly here to stay and until the time that the M.2 standard becomes common on motherboards and notebooks, PCIe is certainly going to be the way to go and there are good prospects for the next generation of drives. I will also note that with the interface board of the M6e requiring a x4 lane and the M6e only using two of these lanes, we can only but guess that Plextor have further ambitions for the M6 line of drives and we can only speculate until that time what the potential outcome may be.

Pros:

• High level of read & write IOPs
• Controller not hindered by compressible data
• PCIe x4 interface removes the SATA III bottleneck
• Around 50% more performance over a comparable SATA based drive

Cons:

• Requires a PCIe x4 lane to operate at full speed – systems without this are not compatible – Although the SATA version of this drive will offer an alternative.

“Getting over the SATA III bottleneck with a single drive has been a dream for quite some time for many enthusiasts and whilst there are some PCIe options out there on the market, the price of these has resulted in another stumbling block for many of those. The M6e from Plextor has opened a gateway to faster storage with a price that I anticipate is going to be desirable as well. If this is the way that storage is going, I look forward to seeing the response from a number of other key storage vendors later this year.”

Thanks to Plextor for providing this review sample.