Product Listing

Plextor M7V SSD review: A first foray into TLC NAND

By Kenny Yeo - 10 Jul 2016

Test Setup & PCMark 8

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!

 

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7.5
  • Performance 7
  • Features 8
  • Value 9
The Good
Lots of nifty features like PlexVault and PlexCompressor
Decent sequential read and write speeds
High claimed endurance for TLC-based SSD
Very attractive price
The Bad
No support for hardware encryption
Erratic performance especially on 4K workloads
No accessories
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