Plextor M3P 256GB SATA 3 SSD Review – Absolutely Marvell-ous Performance

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.1 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Testing today will be in Random Mode which tests with highly incompressible data samples.

The sequential numbers seen in ATTO are replicated here in CrystalDiskMark. 535MB/s read and 437MB/s writes are intriguing results. There are some SATA III SSDs that don’t read as fast as the M3P writes. The 24nm Toggle NAND, combined with new firmware, has helped the random results, too. For 4K QD1 results, 35MB/s and 103MB/s are very competitive with the faster drives on the market. 4K QD32 results of 300MB/s reads and 270.9MB/s write are similarly impressive. Those QD32 throughput scores equate to 73,412 read IOPS and 66,137 write IOPS.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.64

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it tests through use of incompressible data which shows us the worse case performance scenario in SSD transfer speeds.  Many enthusiasts prefer benchmarking with AS SSD for their needs.

AS SSD creates results based on average performance throughout the test. Sequential results of 503MB/s read and 422MB/s write performance are very similar to the CrystalDiskMark results, as are the QD1 random scores of 32MB/s read and 93MB/s write. 512 byte access times are very low and the overall score of 938 is quite high, second only to the Vertex4.

We ran the copy benchmark from AS SSD to see how it’s write speed would translate into real-world copy speeds. The ISO, Program, and Game emulate copy operations with files of different sizes and levels of compressibility. While data compressibility is not applicable for non-SandForce drives, the Plextor puts in numbers comparable to many 240GB SandForce drives which are able to take advantage of the compressible AS SSD file copy tests.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.

The Pro doesn’t disappoint in ASU, either. At a queue depth of 16, the random 4K writes and reads are both above 250MB/s and 64K IOPS. Read and write performance is very much in line with the other benchmarks. Overall, the score of 4,047 is very good for a single drive.

We tried pushing the M3P’s random performance with ASU’s threaded read and write performance tests. At a QD of 32, read IOPS hit 73,441. Write IOPS made it to 65,601. This is close enough to suggest that the Pro’s rated 75K and 68K are not excessively high.