14 DAY TRIAL // Many of our readers were surprised to see Plextor moving from high-quality Toshiba Toggle NAND to a somewhat slower Intel NAND in its new M5S series. It appears that the new M5S series are not the top-performing parts coming from Plextor this summer, and something faster is awaiting us.
The company is now preparing a new performance SSD line that will not use Intel NAND but rather get back to Toshiba-made flash memory.
The new drives will reportedly be called M5P and the design uses Japan-made Toshiba Toggle DDR MLC.
Performance is sure to be higher than what the current Intel NAND is able to achieve. The new cells are manufactured at Toshiba’s Japan semiconductor FABs in the company’s 19nm technology.
We’re very curios to find out what the durability will be for such NAND, as this is the main issue with smaller transistors. The smaller the technology gets, the less durable the NAND cells are.
The second surprise coming inside Plextor’s is the fact that the new series give up on Marvell’s rather old 88SS9174 controller and implement the newer and faster 88SS9187 chipset.
The performance numbers are not “out of this world,” but the most important aspect is the fact that Marvell-powered SSDs usually manifest the same level of performance, no matter what kind of data is stored on them.
The very popular SandForce SSDs have real issues with uncompressible data and most of them show much lower performance if they’re not completely empty of data.
SSDs powered by Marvell controllers offer a constantly high level of performance.
There will be three initial models in Plextor’s new M5P series, with capacities ranging from 128 GB to 512 GB.
Performance-wise, it will be interesting to see how the 512 GB model will perform, as we know that the 88SS9187 chipset has better IOPS performance and there will also be a 768 MB DDR3 DRAM cache integrated on the PCB.
