Hardware Plextor M6 PRO 256GB Review

Good review, however I have a question regarding SSD comparison charts...

Why are 512GB drives in the same table as 128GB drives? Appreciating the hardware differences, is seems a bit unfair to compare a smaller driver which typically has lesser hardware against a bigger, faster drive.

Wouldn’t it be better to group SSD charts into respective capacities, perhaps 64/128GB, 256BG and 512GB+ charts, so it’s fairer against each capacity of drive?

 

Nice cheap 256gb drive for a change. As I was saying to a friend though you have such a choice on ssds now that it all comes down to budget your willing to play in.

Benchmarks are great an all but for ssds most won't tell the difference between 20-30mb a sec here and there. Personally recently installed a few for my friend on sata 2 the drives might do 500mb/sec but he will never see it he did seem overly corncerned. He just wanted to know if it would be faster than his old hard drives.

Seen some super cheap Samsung drives on the market that were refurbed but 256gb for under £80 is a deal most would take.

 

Have I missed something or did you mistake the UK price for the US price? It says on the front page this is £115 (UK).

On Amazon the Crucial M500 can be had for £78 but for £5 more I would probably still go for the Samsung Evo.

 

As expected this new SSD is rapid. Further and no surprise it is rapid, reasonably priced and has features in line with the current generation of SSDs from other manufacturers.

For this reason I commend Plextor for the really distinctive case finish, quite a looker I think. Someone there obviously understands that unless a review finds for some bizarre and inexplicable reason an SSD is not rapid, behaves weird or otherwise just blows up in the test system (never happens) there really is little to differentiate these products.

 

I know it must be tricky as manufacturers only send one SSD and not a complete range for a full analysis, and also time constraints of trying to review 4 SSD's at a time would be unpractical.

While I'm on a troll rampage of the internet, is there any worth in creating a dummy guide to what all the different tests in the benchmarks simulate in terms of real world use? Like what does, in basic terms, 64KB single queue depth mean to me as a home user who uses MS Office, internet browsing and gaming? I know there's loads of info out there but it's quite technical and I get distracted easily. Just helps the average home user interpret your results in a more analogous manor.

Now to find some grammar to pick you up on...

 

Most of it goes over my head, the way I see it with most of the graphs the short bar means the drive is rapid, long bar means the drive is rapid, all results in between = rapid.

The only one that appears to show something tangible is the bootracer, there you can see there is about a second and a half between the fastest and the slowest. So maybe just enough time to contemplate perhaps your own thirst or hunger. As for real world even if you did want to save that hard earned 1.7s even this is mostly sythetic, with Windows 8 fast start up and an SSD you pretty much get the bios splash screen then windows login, sometimes I have not switched on my tv or it has not even warmed up before the login screen displays.

As such I will now be purchasing SSDs using one sole criteria alone: shininess. I hope this can be incorporated into future benchmarks.

 

Anyone else think the thumbnail makes it look a little bit like this drive has a wood (or dodgy wood effect) cover? little bit like this: http://www.wood-database.com/wp-content/uploads/tiete-rosewood1.jpg

 

I fear it would either be worthless info or a 300 page technical essay.

Tbh ssds have come a long way and the early adopter pitfalls have been rooted out to the point where you can't tell one apart from the other during normal consumer use.

Only thing where you can still go wrong is capacity, buyers remorse over getting a too small one is still a problem.

 

I agree with the fact it could be a lecture within itself, but even just a note on the graph title showing what sort of real world use the test has would be good. Like, which one of the charts relates to me opening a Word document of launching an application like Office? I'm not saying the benchmarks are unclear, far from it, but when you look at a mother board review, I tend to focus on the image editing score, overall score and temperatures as these are relative to my everyday use of my PC.

I really don't mean to sound like a troll, just thirsty for knowledge and too lazy to read in-depth articles myself.

 

Not necessarily worthless to everyone though. Remember this is bit-tech and not PC Pro: Not everyone here has engineer / programmer levels of knowledge. I'm distinctly at the 'hobby end' of technical prowess myself - and while I try to read up and keep up as best I can, I freely admit that I'm never going to get close to some of the people on here. Which is fine, as people who work full-time in IT are never going to get close to the 'hobbyists' areas of expertise in their chosen professional fields.

I think it's sometimes easy to overestimate peoples knowledge regarding subjects that you know well yourself.

I think that's a good point. It's not even about being 'lazy', but sometimes it's just very difficult to know how to phrase a search to find what you're looking for, especially you're not really sure precisely what it is you're looking for anyway. I can't be the only person to have spent hours endless typing various permutations and phrases into Google, skim-reading through text and trying again until eventually giving up and not finding what I wanted.

Not everything is a 10-second Google away...

 

I'm far from an expert, but i would say most people can rule out the 4K Random Read, 64/32 QD, as outside of servers, databases, or other high utilisation tasks most people would struggle to achieve a QD of 64/32 (afaik) you would have to read/write many 4k pages to the drive for the NADS not to be able to keep up.

Someone maybe able to correct me if I'm wrong, but i think Sequential Read/Write would be more important if you were looking to read/write large amounts of data from the drive in one go. I.e Large image files, movies, some game assets, or other files that are read/written to in order.

4K Random Read/Write, Single QD (afaik) is more important if you are accessing lots of smaller files out of order, such as the OS files, or other programs that read/write to the odd smallish file now and again.

 

Did anyone else see the picture and wonder how they'd cool an SSD housed in bamboo? Or was that just me?

 

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