An Insight into Plextor
Although the market for SSDs is growing very quickly thanks to falling prices of NAND memory, it has become increasingly difficult for brands without their own NAND manufacturing facilities to stand out.
Samsung, is the undoubtedly leader in the SSD space, and has captured a market share of around 42%. Trailing a long way behind with around 9% to 10% is SanDisk. Followed by a motley crew of brands like Kingston, Toshiba, and of course, Plextor. According to the latest reports, Plextor’s market share currently stands at around 11%, which makes them a reasonably significant player in the industry.
The Plextor M7V is the company's first SSD to use TLC-NAND.
There are two main challenges for brands like Plextor who do not own NAND foundries. Firstly, because they have to buy NAND chips from other manufacturers like Toshiba, SanDisk or Samsung, they cannot afford to compete on price.
Secondly, because they do not manufacture or develop their own NAND chips, they cannot introduce new innovations on the NAND front. Samsung, for example, introduced their own V-NAND two years ago, and it has been a stellar hit for them, spawning the super-fast SSD 950 Pro and the economical but still quick SSD 850 Evo.
What this means is that they have to find other ways to innovate and create value. For Plextor, this means optimizing their drives to run as fast and as reliably as they can with their own in-house developed firmware. This philosophy has given birth to Plextor-developed technologies such as PlexNitro and PlexTurbo. In addition, Plextor also subjects its drives to rigorous testing, beyond what the competition does, to assure users of their reliability.
Introducing the M7V
In a bid to offer their SSDs to a wider audience, Plextor has finally embraced TLC NAND and created the M7V. TLC NAND SSDs are generally more affordable to produce because of their denser NAND chips. Since TLC NAND stores three bits of data per cell, this means that more NAND dies can be harvested from a single wafer, which translates to lower manufacturing costs.
The Plextor M7V will also be offered in the smaller M.2 2280 form factor.
However, TLC NAND is not without its problems. We have written about this extensively in our review of the Samsung SSD 840 Evo, one of the earliest TLC NAND SSDs. But in a nutshell, because of its denser structure, it suffers from poorer write speeds and also endurance. Samsung has done well to mitigate these shortcomings with its technologies, and many other brands have followed suit. Today, competitors like OCZ, Crucial, Toshiba, and even Sony, have SSDs with TLC NAND.
Inside, Plextor has called upon flash memory giants Toshiba to provide their newest 15nm TLC NAND. And on the controller front, Plextor is sticking with Marvell, specifically the Marvell 88SS1074B1. Since Plextor neither manufactures or designs its own NAND or controller, users should expect to see this combination of NAND and controller in other entry-level SSDs soon.
The M7V will also utilize SATA 6Gbps as its interface. The M7V will be offered in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities, and it will also be available in two form factors: regular 2.5-inch and also M.2 2280.
Like all other SSDs in this price segment, the Plextor M7V also uses a SATA 6Gbps interface.
However, where Plextor really differentiates itself is in its custom firmware and exclusive technologies, so let’s talk through some of them now.
PlexNitro is a cache acceleration technology developed specially for TLC NAND SSDs. TLC NAND SSDs have always used cache acceleration technologies to boost performance and this usually means setting aside a certain amount of memory to function as a SLC NAND write cache. Plextor doesn’t specifically mention how PlexNitro works, but it did say that unlike other cache technologies, PlexNitro doesn’t set aside memory for the cache. In other words, you get the full capacity of the SSD. So a 256GB M7V will have exactly 256GB of free space, unlike its competitors which might offer only 250GB or 240GB.
A peek at the Marvell 88SS1074B1 on the M.2 variant of the Plextor M7V.
Another technology that will interest users is PlexTurbo. Much like Samsung’s RAPID mode, PlexTurbo accelerates a drive performance by utilizing unused system memory as a cache. Since accessing DRAM is many times faster than accessing the SSD drive, performance is boosted throughout. However, note that PlexTurbo needs lots of memory to work and Plextor recommends 32GB of RAM (gasp!) for PlexTurbo to work its best.
Apart from PlexNitro and PlexTurbo, the M7V also features other Plextor technologies such PlexVault and PlexCompressor. The former is a security feature that lets you store and hide data from others, which is useful if your system is shared with others; while the latter is a special technology that automatically compresses seldom used data to free up space on the drive. Finally, there's PlexTool, which is Plextor's drive management utility. It lets users monitor, manage their drives; and provides a quick and easy way for users to update their drives' firmware.
PlexTool lets users monitor, manage their drives; and provides a quick and easy way for users to update their drives' firmware.
Plextor SSDs also stand out for their reliability. For some time now, 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.
Test Setup
The drives will be tested on our updated storage testbed using the Windows 10 operating system, which has the following specifications:
- Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz)
- ASUS Z97-Deluxe/USB 3.1 (Intel Z97 chipset)
- 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600 memory
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
- Windows 10 Pro
We have also revised our benchmarks and the list used are as follows:
- AS-SSD benchmark 1.8.5636.36856
- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
- PCMark 8 (Storage suite)
- Atto Disk Benchmark 3.0.5
- Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
This is the list of drives and their capacities tested:
- Plextor M7V (512GB)
- OCZ Trion 150 (480GB)
- Samsung SSD 750 Evo (250GB)
- Sony SLW-M (480GB)
- Samsung SSD 850 Evo (250GB)
- Plextor M6 Pro (256GB)
Given the positioning and claims by Plextor, we will be looking closely at how the M7V performs against the current crop of TLC-NAND drives, such as the OCZ Trion 150 and Samsung SSD 750 Evo and SSD 850 Evo. But bear in mind here that the Samsung drives are of a smaller capacity and so are expected to perform poorer. We also want to find out how the M7V will fare against Plextor’s last flagship SATA-based SSD, the M6 Pro.
PCMark 8
PCMark 8 is the most up-to-date system benchmarking software from benchmarking specialists Futuremark. It was designed for Windows 8 machines (now updated for Windows 10) and the storage suite test puts drives through a collection of 10 different real life workloads involving applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Word, Excel and even games like Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft.
The Plextor M7V got off to a disappointing start on PCMark 8. Its score of 4875 was the lowest recorded. And if we look deeper at the recorded speeds, we can see that it only managed 145.5MB/s, which was the slowest by some margin. The next slowest drive was the Sony SLW-M which recorded a speed of 198.43MB/s - that’s over 36% faster. The fastest drive was, surprisingly, the 250GB Samsung SSD 850 Evo, which recorded a speed of 302.38MB/s. That’s over twice as fast as the Plextor M7V!
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 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 and 4KB (queue depth 32) data.
On CrystalDiskMark, the Plextor M7V’s performance was slightly improved, but still a mixed bag. Sequential read and write speeds were of an acceptable level, but they were still lagging behind directly comparable drives like the OCZ Trion 150 and Sony SLW-M. Moving on, the M7V recorded the highest 4K read speeds of 37.39MB/s - over 33% faster than the OCZ and Sony drives. However, it then recorded the lowest 4K write speeds too of just 95.1MB/s. We noticed the same pattern on the more intensive 4K, 32 queue depth workload too. Here, the M7V’s read speed was decent, but its write speed was poor once more.
AS SSD 1.8.5636.36856 Results
AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. This benchmark is useful because some controllers, like the once popular but now defunct SandForce SF-2281, compress data first before moving them around. However, with non-compressible and random data, controllers cannot compress the data first, which forces them to deal with data as they are. Therefore, this is a useful benchmark to prevent drivers using controllers like the SF-2281 controller or similar from gaining an upper hand.
On AS SSD, the Plextor M7V’s put in an inconsistent showing. On the Copy benchmark, its scores put it amongst the slower drives. Both the OCZ Trion 150 and Sony SLW-M were comfortably quicker across all three copy workloads, and so was even the smaller capacity Samsung SSD 850 Evo. Sequential read and write performance, however, was quite decent; and then its performance took a dip once more on the 4K work load where its speeds were amongst the slowest. But then on the final 4K, 64 queue depth workload, the M7V picked itself up once more and recorded quite decent numbers.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 3.0.2 Results
ATTO is one of the oldest benchmarks around, but it’s still a useful tool to gauge a drive’s adeptness at managing compressible data. It’s also useful for seeing how a drive performs across a variety of different transfer block size. So far, the Plextor M7V is shaping up to be a somewhat inconsistent performing drive and this inconsistency was evident on the ATTO benchmark as well. On the 8MB and 512K workloads, its performance was fairly good and within our expectations. However, when it came to smaller data block sizes of 4K, its performance tapered off significantly. What’s interesting is that the Plextor M6 Pro also exhibited the same type of irregular performance. Looks like it’s an issue that affects Plextor drives.
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. Thus far, the Plextor M7V has been rather inconsistent and disappointing in its performance, and this trend continued on Iometer. The M7V began quite brightly as its Streaming Reads performance figures were quite decent. However, its Streaming Writes performance was really underwhelming, and this was something we noticed in the older Plextor M6 Pro drive as well. On the more intensive File Server workload, the M7V found itself in the middle of the pack; and its performance on the Web Server workload was average as well.
Iometer Results (Part 2)
Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. The Plextor M7V’s average response times mirrors our findings on the previous page. On a whole, the M7V recorded slightly higher than average response times, which explains its mediocre performance.
A SSD for bargain hunters
If you want to be fashionably late to a party, you had better roll up to the door with something to show for, because all eyes will be on you. For Plextor, who’s late to the TLC NAND party, they proudly proclaimed that their new TLC drive - the M7V - would offer performance and endurance that are beyond the competition. It’s hard for us to determine the latter, but we can certainly test the former and the results were quite disappointing.
Despite, Plextor’s bold claims, we found that the M7V’s performance was mediocre, at best. While sequential read and write speeds were quite respectable and decent, we found that its 4K performance was generally erratic and disappointing. Clearly, its 4K performance needs some more work.
Speaking of performance, it seems that insofar as TLC NAND SSDs are concerned, Samsung’s SSD 750 Evo and SSD 850 Evo are unmatched. In just about every benchmark, the two drives were ranked amongst the fastest, and the SSD 850 Evo, even though it had a capacity of 250GB, was more than capable of keeping up with the other larger capacity 480GB and 512GB drives. Larger capacity drives are generally faster because of increased parallelism due to their greater number of onboard NAND dies.
Fortunately, the M7V tries to make up for its lack of performance with its various features. The accompanying PlexTool drive management utility is straightforward to use and useful for maintaining and update your SSD. PlexVault is a nifty tool for users to hide contents on their systems from prying eyes. And PlexCompressor is a nice feature to have that can potentially free up space for users.
The M7V doesn't quite live up to Plextor's claims, but it is extremely affordable and boasts a long rated endurance.
And for users concerned about endurance, the M7V’s has some of the highest rated endurance that we have seen for a TLC NAND SSD. The 512GB model, for instance, is said to be good for 320TBW (TB written). In comparison, the new 500GB variant of the Samsung SSD 750 Evo has a rated endurance of just 100TBW, while the 480GB variant of the OCZ Trion 150 is rated at 120TBW.
But the biggest trump card Plextor has got to be its price. The 512GB that is we have tested here and a going price of just S$179. You’d be hard pressed to find another SSD of similar capacity with a comparable price. Samsung’s SSD 850 Evo and SSD 750 Evo are the performance kings, but half a terabyte versions of these two drives are S$259 and S$229 respectively - that translates to a premium of S$50 or 27%. To add, OCZ’s Trion 150 is S$190 and Sony’s SLW-MG4 is S$259.
In closing, the Plextor M7V is a sensible option for users on a tight budget. It won’t win any performance awards, but it is backed up by a rich feature set, great rated endurance, but most of all, a very attractive price - the exact qualities that casual users are looking for a basic SSD. As such, we've awarded the Plextor M7V our Best Value award.
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