Plextor M6e 256GB PCIe SSD Review

AkG · May 8, 2014

While Plextor hasn’t seen themselves in many headlines these days, their new M6e will likely get folks talking. Indeed, many enthusiasts fondly remember the Plextor PX-716 DVD burner as it was the personification of high end performance in its day. While Plextor has fallen of the radar for all but a loyal following of fans, in the years since their heyday this company hasn’t sat idle, deciding to expand their portfolio into the crowded SSD market.

Unlike the early 2000's where their reputation was built upon being the best of the best, Plextor has a budding reputation for providing some of the best bang for your buck SSD's available. They may not manufacture their own controller, or NAND (or any other critical components for that matter) but what they do have is a lot experience in what customers want and how to go about wringing the most from any storage solution. This critical knowledge has been leveraged towards designing custom firmwares for their drives which provides top-tier performance from components many of the competition use for lower-end drives.

Much like the M5 series before it, Plextor’s all new M6 series comes in a variety of flavors and form factors, though the M6e does stand out as a rather unique device. PCI-E based solid state drives aren’t unique and the new M.2 form factor is something we’ll be seeing a lot more of in the coming months. However, what Plextor has done with the M6e is combine an M.2 SSD with a standard PCI-E 2.0 interface through a x4 adaptor card.

The combination of two interfaces gives the drive a level of flexibility rarely seen in the storage market. With one purchase consumers can either use the M6e inside their ATX-based system or, with the turn of a screwdriver, use the M6e inside a small form factor system that uses the new M.2 standard. Doing so will void your warranty but at least the potion is there.

The synergy between PCI-E and M.2 form factors has allowed Plextor to offer an entirely new type of device aimed squarely at gamers: inexpensive, high performance PCI-E based storage. Historically SSDs which use the high speed PCI-E interface come with equal doses of bleeding edge performance and extreme price tags. Seeing $2 or more per Gigabyte is routine for this niche, and while the M6e’s $299 cost is a touch high for a 256GB SATA-based drive, it’s quite affordable for the segment it plays in.

While 770MB/s read and 580MB/s write throughput is a far cry from classical PCI-E performance levels, it is well in excess of what any SATA SSD can offer right now. The only limiting factor for some users, particularly those using ITX motherboards, is that it takes up a PCI-E slot.

On closer inspection we can see that the Plextor M6e is a puzzling mixture of components. On the one hand it uses a PCI-E 2.0 x4 adapter board which would lead people to believe that the drive attached to the adapter card is in fact a x4 device. However, the SSD portion only has a pair of PCI-E lanes available.

The M6e 256GB SSD sans PCI-E adapter consists of a server-grade Marvel 8SS9183 controller, a single NANYA branded 512MB DDR3 Ram module, and eight Toshiba 19nm Toggle Mode NAND ICs.

On the surface all this is perfectly reasonably but the use of Marvel’s 9183 controller is an interesting choice. It is a dual core controller which allows the M6e to bypass the motherboard's PCH and connect directly via two PCI-E 2.0 lanes. This is pretty much par for the course and shouldn’t bottleneck the drive’s potential bandwidth but we can’t forget that four lane M.2 SSDs are on the horizon and Marvell will soon be replacing the 9183 with a suitable controller.

Eight high performance NAND ICs, a good controller and access to two PCI-E 2.0 lanes should prove to be a very good combination considering the M6e’s reasonable asking price. It’s also a simple design which doesn’t need additional software or user massaging to work properly. Those are important factors for gamers who want a storage device that can offer more than typical SATA-based SSDs.

AkG · May 8, 2014

Test System & Testing Methodology

Testing Methodology

Testing a drive is not as simple as putting together a bunch of files, dragging them onto folder on the drive in Windows and using a stopwatch to time how long the transfer takes. Rather, there are factors such as read / write speed and data burst speed to take into account. There is also the SATA controller on your motherboard and how well it works with SSDs & HDDs to think about as well. For best results you really need a dedicated hardware RAID controller w/ dedicated RAM for drives to shine. Unfortunately, most people do not have the time, inclination or monetary funds to do this. For this reason our test-bed will be a more standard motherboard with no mods or high end gear added to it. This is to help replicate what you the end user’s experience will be like.

Even when the hardware issues are taken care of the software itself will have a negative or positive impact on the results. As with the hardware end of things, to obtain the absolute best results you do need to tweak your OS setup; however, just like with the hardware solution most people are not going to do this. For this reason our standard OS setup is used. However, except for the Windows 7 load test times we have done our best to eliminate this issue by having the drive tested as a secondary drive. With the main drive being an Intel DC S3700 800GB Solid State Drive.

For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, Crystal Disk Benchmark, IOMeter, AS-SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark 7.

For real world benchmarks we timed how long a single 10GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 10gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 12,000 files in 400 subfolders.

For all testing a Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard was used, running Windows 7 64bit Ultimate edition. All drives were tested using AHCI mode using Intel RST 10 drivers.

All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented.

In between each test suite runs (with the exception being IOMeter which was done after every run) the drives are cleaned with either HDDerase, SaniErase or OCZ SSDToolbox and then quick formatted to make sure that they were in optimum condition for the next test suite.

Processor: Core i5 2500
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: 8GB Corsair Vengeance LP “blue”
Graphics card: Asus 5550 passive
Hard Drive: Intel DC S3700 800GB, Intel 910 800GB
Power Supply: XFX 850

SSD FIRMWARE (unless otherwise noted):

OCZ Vertex 2 100GB: 1.33
Intel 520: 400i
SanDisk Extreme 240GB: R211
Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB: M206
Intel 335 180GB: 335
SanDisk Extreme 2 240GB: R1311
Seagate Pro 600: B660
OCZ Vector 150 240GB: 1.2
Angelbird Adler 640GB: AA3.15
Vertex 460 240GB: 1.0
ADATA SP920 512GB: MU01
Intel 7230 240GB: L2010400
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB

XM06B0Q
 Plextor M6e 256GB: 1.02
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w

unctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w

oNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w

ontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w

ontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]-->
Marvell 9183 controller:
 Plextor M6e 256GB- custom firmware w/ 21nm Toggle Mode NAND

Samsung MDX controller:
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB - custom firmware w/ 21nm Toggle Mode NAND

SandForce SF1200 controller:
OCZ Vertex 2 - ONFi 2 NAND

SandForce SF2281 controller:
Intel 520 - custom firmware w/ ONFi 2 NAND

LAMD controller:
Corsair Neutron GTX - Toggle Mode NAND
Seagate 600 Pro - custom firmware w/ Toggle Mode NAND

Marvell 9187 controller:
Crucial M500 - Custom firmware w/ 128Gbit ONFi 3 NAND
SanDisk Extreme 2 - Custom firmware w/ 19nm eX2 ABL NAND

Marvell 9189 controller:
ADATA SP920 - Custom firmware w/ 128Gbit ONFi 3 NAND

Barefoot 3 controller:
OCZ Vector 150 (M00) - 19nm Toggle Mode NAND
OCZ Vertex 460 (M10) - 19nm Toggle Mode NAND

Novachips NVS3600A controller:
Angelbird Adler - ONFi 2 NAND

Intel X25 G3 controller:
Intel 730 - custom firmware w/ ONFi 2 NAND

AkG · May 8, 2014

Read Bandwidth / Write Performance

Read Bandwidth

<i>For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/read.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

Write Performance

<i>For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/write.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

Since it is not bandwidth limited by the SATA bus, the M6e does post some pretty impressive numbers. By the same token these results are only impressive when compared against SATA based drives and is rather mediocre compared to its PCI-E based alternatives. Of course this drive is also a lot cheaper than most PCI-E SSDs so it does all balance out.

AkG · May 8, 2014

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

The read results of the M6e are out of this world and well in excess of what any SATA drive can accomplish but thanks to that older 9183 controller and fewer NAND ICs the write results are only mediocre. Obviously this drive was meant for large file sequential file performance.

AkG · May 8, 2014

Crystal DiskMark / PCMark 7

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB.

PCMark 7

While there are numerous suites of tests that make up PCMark 7, only one is pertinent: the HDD Suite. The HDD Suite consists of numerous tests that try and replicate real world drive usage. Everything from how long a simulated virus scan takes to complete, to MS Vista start up time to game load time is tested in these core tests; however we do not consider this anything other than just another suite of synthetic tests. For this reason, while each test is scored individually we have opted to include only the overall score.

The M6e is certainly an entirely new and different type of storage device that is quite narrowly targeted but seems to be well rounded enough to provide great performance in nearly every scenario.

AkG · May 8, 2014

AS-SSD / Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data.

Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

Much like AS-SSD, Anvil Pro was created to quickly and easily – yet accurately – test your drives. While it is still in the Beta stages it is a versatile and powerful little program. Currently it can test numerous read / write scenarios but two in particular stand out for us: 4K queue depth of 4 and 4K queue depth of 16. A queue depth of four along with 4K sectors can be equated to what most users will experience in an OS scenario while 16 depth will be encountered only by power users and the like. We have also included the 4k queue depth 1 results to help put these two other numbers in their proper perspective. All settings were left in their default states and the test size was set to 1GB.

Once again these results are decent - if not exactly overwhelmingly better than comparably priced SATA based options.

AkG · May 8, 2014

IOMeter

IOMETER

<i>IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/iom.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

Thanks to the removal of the SATA host controlle,r the M6e's Marvell 9183 is able to stretch its legs and show what it can really do. Put simply this is an enterprise-class controller that Plextor has co-opted for a more mainstream device. While they have tweaked the firmware for lower queue depth scenarios, when given the chance it does a remarkable job at handling highly demanding 'workstation-esque' problems.

AkG · May 8, 2014

Windows 7 / ADOBE CS5 LOAD TIME

Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. Where Windows 7 has become nearly ubiquitous for solid state drive enthusiasts we have chosen Windows 7 64bit Ultimate as our Operating System. In previous load time tests we would use the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line; this however is no longer the case. We have not only added in a secondary Anti-Virus to load on startup, but also an anti-malware program. We have set Super Anti-Spyware to initiate a quick scan on Windows start-up and the completion of the quick scan will be our new finish line.

ADOBE CS5 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

Now that we have moved away from synthetic testing and into more real world scenarios the M6e really can show us what it can do. Its mediocre small file performance is more than easily made up for by massive sequential file performance. The end result is a storage device that blends the best of both worlds: near SATA prices with near PCI-E performance.

AkG · May 8, 2014

Firefox Performance / Real World Data Transfers

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

<i>Firefox is notorious for being slow on loading tabs in offline mode once the number of pages to be opened grows larger than a dozen or so. We can think of fewer worse case scenarios than having 100 tabs set to reload in offline mode upon Firefox startup, but this is exactly what we have done here.

By having 100 pages open in Firefox portable, setting Firefox to reload the last session upon next session start and then setting it to offline mode, we are able to easily recreate a worst case scenario. Since we are using Firefox portable all files are easily positioned in one location, making it simple to repeat the test as necessary. In order to ensure repetition, before touching the Firefox portable files, we have backed them up into a .rar file and only extracted a copy of it to the test device.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/ff.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

Real World Data Transfers

<i>No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. </i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/copy_lg.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/m6e/copy_sm.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

If you are looking for a moderately priced storage device that will absolutely crush game load times the M6e is a great option. It simply offers performance well beyond what any SATA drive can do and does so without the usual PCI-E price tag.

AkG · May 8, 2014

Partial and Full Drive Performance

Partial and Full Drive Performance

While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing if a solid state drive will behave differently when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity.

Synthetic Test Results

For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard PCMark 7 test.

Real World Results
For a real world application we have opted for our standard Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance test.

This is certainly a weak point of any Marvell based drive and while Plextor has obviously wrung every ounce of performance out if it that they could, at the end of the day the M6e lives and dies by its lack of over provisioning. Performance simply drops like a stone.

Plextor M6e 256GB PCIe SSD Review

Well-known member

Well-known member

Testing Methodology

Well-known member

Read Bandwidth

Write Performance

Well-known member

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Well-known member

Crystal DiskMark

PCMark 7

Well-known member

AS-SSD

Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

Well-known member

IOMETER

Well-known member

Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

ADOBE CS5 LOAD TIME

Well-known member

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

Real World Data Transfers

Well-known member

Partial and Full Drive Performance

Latest posts

About Us

Online statistics

Follow Us On Social Media

Contact