14 DAY TRIAL // Solid-state drives come out all the time, but they don't always become available right away, and when they do, they don't necessarily reach all nations in the world. The Plextor M6S SSD line is an example of this.
Plextor released the storage devices about a couple of weeks ago, give or take, but they weren't available all over the world.
More specifically, they were not up for order in any country from Europe, also known as the Old Continent to people across the pond.
Obviously, this seriously restricted the potential revenue of the company, and didn't exactly endear the folks in Europe much either.
After all, the M6S series is among the most advanced solid-state drives to date, and it doesn't even use the SandForce controller technology from LSI.
SandForce (which used to be an independent company) gained fame for making the fastest controller chips for solid-state drives a few years ago.
Since then, it has maintained its lead, performance-wise, being one of, if not the only, chip makers that made controllers capable of both writing and reading data at over 500 MB/s.
Plextor's new SSDs don't use SandForce, but they are still reasonably fast, reaching 520 MB/s when reading data and writing new files at 440 MB/s. They should be up for order in Europe now, finally.
For those who want to know all the specifics, a Marvell SS9188 dual-core controller is employed. Not the best, but good enough here, especially since Plextor wanted to keep thins reasonably priced as well.
Besides, a more important facet is the use of 19nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND memory from Toshiba, the most advanced and recent type of solid-state technology so far.
All in all, the solid-state drive is a 2.5-inch unit with a thickness (or height if you prefer) of 7 mm. Not the thinnest but not the thickest either.
It would make for a good portable storage device actually, if it had a USB 3.0 port instead of SATA 6.0 Gbps (SATA III).
Finally, there are three capacity options, and they aren't what you might expect. While most consumer SSDs come in 64 GB upwards (or even less sometimes), the Plextor M6S don't go below 128 GB (a drive which is priced at €82 / $113). The other two capacity options are 256 GB (which bears a price of €145 /$200) and 512 GB (€306 / $423). All Plextor M6S solid-state drives ship backed by a three-year warranty.