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4 High-end PCIe SSD drives tested for your next DIY PC

By Kenny Yeo - 4 Aug 2016

Plextor M6e Black Edition

Plextor M6e Black Edition

Of all the drives, the Plextor M6e Black Edition has the best design and looks fast.

Like the other drives here, the Plextor M6e Black Edition is the company’s flagship drive. And unlike the other drives which look dull and staid, the M6e Black Edition actually manages to look quite good.

The reason for this is Plextor’s attention to detail. The entire enclosure which is in black and houses the heatsink has been given sandblasted finish, while the large bright red cooling fins provides great visual contrast. Looking around the drive we can also see LED status indicator lights, and additional 15-pin external SATA power connector and also extra pins that can be used to connect to your chassis’ HDD status indicators. You won’t find all these bells and whistles on the other drives.

There's an additional 15-pin external SATA power connector, should your motherboard be incapable of providing enough juice.

Note the sandblasted finish on the enclosure and also the pins that can be connected to your chassis' LED status indicators.

Unfortunately, most users will then be disappointed by the fact that the Plextor M6e Black Edition supports only a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. With just two PCIe 2.0 lanes, that means a total bandwidth of just 1000MB/s, which isn’t as big improvement over SATA 6Gbps as compared to the other drives. In fact, the M6e Black Edition’s rated sequential read and write speeds for the 512GB model that we are reviewing stand at just 770MB/s and 625MB/s respectively, which is a great deal less than what the other PCIe-based SSDs that we have rounded up here can achieve.

Underneath the attractive enclosure and heatsink, the Plextor M6e Black Edition is powered by a Marvell 88SS9183 controller and uses Toshiba’s A19nm MLC NAND. And if you actually peel the heatsink off, you’ll find that there’s actually an M.2 drive underneath. In this respect, the Plextor M6e Black Edition and the Kingston HyperX Predator are actually very similar.

Luckily, the Plextor M6e Black Edition redeems itself in other ways. To begin, pre-production units of Plextor’s SSDs are rigorously tested to ensure they perform without a hitch before they can be approved for retail. This include a 100% burn-in and aging test; a 48-hour long sustained read and write test; 250 times boot cycle test; and a 4000 times idle recovery test. This explains why Plextor drives are generally regarded by many enthusiasts to be one of the most reliable around.

The bundled PlexTool utility lets users monitor and manage their Plextor drives.

On top of that, the Plextor M6e Black Edition also supports a host of Plextor technologies, including PlexTool, PlexTurbo, PlexVault, PlexCompressor, TrueSpeed and TrueProtect. Here’s a summary of each of these technologies:

  • PlexTool - A utility to manage and monitor your drive, as well as to help update the firmware.
  • PlexTurbo - A caching technology that uses system memory to dramatically boost performance.
  • PlextVault - A security feature that lets you store and hide data from others, which is useful if your system is shared with others.
  • PlexCompressor - Automatically compresses data to give user’s more free space.
  • TrueSpeed and TrueProtect - The former helps sustain performance levels even as the drive runs low on capacity, while the latter is a multi-layered error checking mechanism and provides 256-bit AES encryption.

The final thing to note for system builders is that drive does not come with a half-height bracket, and only comes with mounting screws.

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