Plextor’s Top-Performing M5P Series Benchmarked

The next generation of SSDs from Plextor, the highly anticipated M5P series, have finally been tested and the results confirm that the performance is quite a bit better than the new Intel-based M5S and the Toshiba-based favorite M3P series.

Plextor’s M5P series is the new top-performing SSD line from the Japanese company and, like many expected, this marks a new collaboration with Japanese NAND manufacturer Toshiba.

Technologically speaking, Toshiba’s Toggle DDR MLC NAND is the fastest NAND tech that is widely available.

The new drives feature large amounts of DDR3-1333Mhz DRAM cache and the 256 GB model tested by the hardware experts at expreview.com has 256 MB of such DRAM on board.

The top-of-the-line 512 GB model comes with 768 MB or DDR3-1333Mhz DRAM, but it’s the 256 GB model that’s being dissected in this testing session.

Plextor’s M5P series uses the newer Marvell 88SS9187 chipset that offers better IOPS random 4K performance, and this is the same chip used in OCZ’s famous Vertex 4 series.

The results confirm that the performance is considerably better than what the Plextor M3P was able to offer and supposedly better than the current mid-range M5S series using Intel-made NAND.

The new drive uses 19nm NAND and we would really like to know a P/E cycle rating for the M5P series, but such information is not available yet.

However, buyers shouldn’t worry about Plextor’s new drive failing too soon, as the company is bold enough to back their new products with an impressive 5-year warranty.



The pricing is expected to be right in line with what the M3P was priced initially but, at the moment, there is no definite info on the official pricing.



Make sure you check out here all the benchmark results obtained by the guys at expreview.com.