Plextor M6e Black Edition 128GB PCI Express SSD Review

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INTRODUCTION

SATA compatible solid state drives (SSDs) may have been the ones to start their very own small performance revolution in the PC market almost a decade ago but as we speak thanks to several advancements in the field the tiny M.2 and full size PCI-express based models are the ones mostly preferred by professionals, serious gamers and enthusiasts. Fortunately although a few years back consumers only had a handful of such solutions to choose from by just a couple of manufacturers today most have at several such models in their product lines something which as expected has helped not only keep prices low but has also helped boost performance and durability levels. Plextor is without doubt one of the oldest players in the market and although they already have a rather successful PCIe SSD model in their lineup (M6e) they just recently released an updated version called the M6e Black Edition.



PLEXTOR is a world-leading developer of award-winning solid state drives, and other high-performance digital storage devices for professionals, consumers, and enterprises. The PLEXTOR brand of storage and multimedia products is owned by Shinano Kenshi of Japan. The PLEXTOR brand name was created in United States in 1993, and comes from two parts: PLEX and TOR. “PLEX” originated from the suffix of “multiplex”. Here, “multiplex” means relating to a system of transmitting several messages or signals simultaneously on the same circuit or channel, just as making silk which is being composed of many materials and needed a precise and delicate process. “TOR” originated from motor, which is the first product with Shinano Kenshi’s core technologies in electric industry. Since the introduction of our very first CD-ROM back in 1989, PLEXTOR has had an obsessive approach to quality and performance. As we grew, PLEXTOR’s legendary optical drives became the performance benchmark against which all others in the industry were measured. Today that legend lives on, not only in our new generation of Blu-ray drives but in our multi-award winning solid-state drives. As additional users discover the benefits of our high-performance SSDs, our engineers continue to insist that every PLEXTOR product be designed to deliver maximum reliability and true performance.



The M6e Black Edition is an PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 interface SSD (just like the M6e before it) based on a Marvell PCIe to flash controller (88SS9183) with 19nm MLC NAND flash modules by Toshiba (2nd gen A19) and currently available in 128, 256 and 512GB capacities. Unfortunately as expected although the 512GB variant offers a very good write performance of up to 625MB/s that number drops to 580MB/s for the 256GB model and even less at 335MB/s for the 128GB model which we have here today. If these numbers however are not enough for you then you're in luck since much like Samsung (RAPID) Plextor also offers their very own PlexTurbo caching software (SSD Smart Cache Technology) which basically uses a chunk of your system RAM to accelerate read/write performance. Sounds promising right?