A Shrunken M6S
The Plextor M6M was first seen along with the M6S earlier this year at CeBIT 2014.
Prices of SSDs have been on a downwards trend in the past year and have never been more affordable. What’s more, the start of this year saw the launch of many new SSDs targeted at mainstream users, which has surely helped drive prices even lower. Now, many mainstream SSDs such as the Crucial M550, Samsung SSD 840 EVO and Plextor M6S can all be had under the magic $1 per gigabyte mark.
Speaking of the Plextor M6S, it was launched earlier this year at CeBIT 2014 and it was introduced alongside the new mSATA-based M6M and PCIe-based M6e. Together, these drives formed the lineup for Plextor’s new M6 series, and they were only recently joined the new M6 Pro with PlexTurbo caching technology, which was just launched at Computex 2014. And today, we will be taking a closer look at the mSATA-based M6M drive.
Since the Plextor M6M is based on the mSATA form factor, it is naturally very compact, measuring just about 5cm long and 3cm in width and weighs less than 10g. Looking at it, it is quite unbelievable how something of this size can hold 256GB worth of data - there is even a 512GB variant.
The Plextor M6M uses the same Marvell controller and Toshiba memory as the M6S.
Taking a closer look at the drive, we can see that it is driven by the same Marvell 88SS9188 controller as the Plextor M6S. As we have mentioned previously, this controller is really a pared down version of the more powerful 88SS9187 found in high-end consumer SSDs like the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme and SanDisk Xtreme II. Chiefly, the 88SS9188 controller has only four memory channels rather than eight. While this will no doubt have a negative impact on performance, but if you think about it, since there is only space for four NAND packages on an mSATA form factor drive, the 88SS9188 is actually well suited for mSATA applications. As for the NAND chips, the Plextor M6M uses Toshiba’s widely used 19nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND. Finally, the drive is based on the SATA 6Gbps interface, which is not to be confused with the newer and faster M.2 interface.
Since Plextor is favored by enthusiasts for its reliability, it should come as no surprise then that the M6M is also subjected to the same rigorous testing as its M6S brethren. Specifically, pre-production units of the M6M were put through a 576-hour testing process that includes testing the drives ability to recover from hibernation up to 4000 times, 48-hour 4k read and write cycle tests, warm and cold boot cycle tests, and 24 hours of sequential reads and writes.
Test Setup
The drives will be tested on our recently revamped storage testbed. The main changes are the faster Core i5-2500K processor and an accompanying Z77 motherboard which has native Thunderbolt connectivity.
- Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
- ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
- 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
- Windows 7
We have also revised our benchmarks, ditching older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also including an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance.
The list of benchmarks used are as follows:
- AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
- PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
- Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
- Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)
Considering that the Plextor M6M and the M6S share similar components, it will be interesting to see how the two drives stack up against each other. We will also be looking at its performance against other mainstream SSDs such as the Crucial M550 and Samsung SSD 840 Pro. While the rest of the drives tested are regular 2.5-inch drives, past experience tells us that the form factor of the drive has little bearing on performance and this is even more true for the M6M since its controller only has four memory channels and is well suited for mSATA applications. Here is the full list of drives tested:
- Plextor M6M
- Plextor M6S
- Crucial M550
- OCZ Vertex 460
- Samsung SSD 840 EVO
- Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme
- Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Timing Test
Recently added to our evaluation of SSDs is how they perform in real world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously, which includes resource intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.
Looking at the timings recorded for the various scenarios, it is clear that there is not much to separate the Plextor M6M from and M6S. The times recorded for cold start and applications launch were highly similar, but the Plextor M6M was about half a second quicker when it came to rebooting. Against other mainstream drives such as the Crucial M550 and Samsung SSD 840 EVO, we found the Plextor M6M to be a tad slower.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results
CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data.
On CrystalDiskMark, we found that the recorded speeds of the Plextor M6M was again very similar to the M6S. Apart from 4K write speeds, which the M6M trailed by around 19%, the rest of the results were just about identical. Unfortunately, this also means that like the M6S, the M6M was slightly slower than the other mainstream SSDs - though we must emphasize that the difference was not much.
AS SSD 1.7.4739 Results
AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using controllers such as the SandForce SF-2281 cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of their strong advantages and help us score it more evenly against other drives.
On AS SSD, the results of the Plextor M6M and M6S were, once again, very similar and even closer to each other than CrystalDiskMark. What this also means is that the M6M was also slightly slower than the other mainstream SSDs. However, it is worth noting that the Samsung SSD 840 EVO was competitive up until the 4k, 64-thread queue depth workload, which was its Achilles heel, presumably due to its TurboWrite cache expiring.
PCMark 7 Results
PCMark 7 is a benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.
Unsurprising, the Plextor M6M managed the exact same score on PCMark 7 as the M6S. Looking at the breakdown, we can see that speeds recorded were very similar. As a result, the M6M scored marginally higher than the M550 and OCZ Vertex 460 and comes closet to challenging the Samsung SSD 840 EVO and even the high-end Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme.
Iometer Results (Part 1)
Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face.
If you have trouble seeing both the graphs of the Plextor M6M and M6S, fret not, this is because the two are so similar in performance that their graphs are mostly exact copies of each other. Overall, the M6M’s performance on Iometer was good, though its showing on the Web Server workload was a little below average. That said, its performance on the File Server workload was stellar as only the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme recorded higher IOPs.
Iometer Results (Part 2)
Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. Given their almost identical performance, the average response times for Plextor's M6M was very comparable to the M6S. Hence, response times for the Web Server workload was a little slow, especially on higher queue depths.
The Price is Wrong
Considering that the Plextor M6M and M6S share similar components - same Marvell controller and Toshiba NAND - it was not surprising to see that the two drives performed nearly identically across all benchmarks. As a result, the M6M’s performance can best be described as competitive, like the M6S. And like its M6S sibling, the M6M had a strong showing on PCMark 7 and Iometer, but lost out to rival drives such as the Crucial M550, OCZ Vertex 460 and Samsung SSD 840 EVO on CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD and our Timing Tests.
The Plextor M6M offers competitive performance, but its recommend retail price does it no favors in this tightly-contested market.
When it comes to pricing, be prepared to pay a slight premium as the Plextor M6M comes in at S$269, which is about S$40 more than the M6S. This is actually nothing unusual as other mSATA form factor drives such as the Samsung SSD 840 EVO also commands a slight premium over the regular 2.5-inch variant. For example, the 2.5-inch version of the Samsung SSD 840 EVO costs S$229, whereas the mSATA variant costs S$249.
Despite this, most of you would have probably noticed that the premium that the Plextor M6M commands is greater than that of the Samsung SSD 840 EVO. As a result, the Plextor M6M is actually one of the pricier mSATA SSDs in the local market today. Apart from the Samsung SSD 840 EVO, the other key rival in this segment is the mSATA variant of the Crucial M500, which is by far the most affordable at S$189.
If you remember, the Plextor M6S was actually one of the most affordable mainstream SSDs at S$229 - cheaper than the Crucial M550 and Samsung SSD 840 EVO - so this puts the M6M in a difficult spot as it is in fact the priciest mSATA SSD in the local market right now. Furthermore, while its performance is certainly decent and competitive, it does not quite justify the price premium over its rivals in this segment. All things considered then, we find it hard to recommend the Plextor M6M as heartily as the M6S, and if you really need an mSATA SSD, there are more compelling options out there from Samsung and Crucial.
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