The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
This year is supposed to see the overall acceptance of the M.2, or NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor), to provide for a uniform and general adaption of ‘mSATA type’ SSDs as a whole. Right now we have the older mini-PCIe SSD, mSATA SSD, two different but similar sizes of blade SSDs, a larger blade SSD used in the MacBook Pro and, while we are onto Apple products, different configured Mac blade SSDs for different years of product. Apparently, Apple believed they could curb third party manufacture/sales and have the consumer pay upwards in the area of $1000 for a simple upgrade where the original SSD wasn’t even returned.
Luckily, our SSD needs remain constrained to our present hardware and retail mSATA sales are still geared to upgrading the consumer into the world of SSDs. The Plextor M5M SSD is a perfect candidate for that and one of the best mSATA SSDs we have tested to date. With incompressible data transfer performance of 534MB/s read and 436MB/s write, along with the added support of read and write IOPS over the 65,000 mark, topping the charts in Vantage HDD testing seems natural.
Plextor’s solid reputation, standard warranty of three years, availability and price point make the M5M a ‘must have’ for those that have to have one of the best SSDs on the market for the best price. The Plextor M5m 6Gbps mSATA SSD is awarded with our Editors Choice Award.
Thank you!
Thank you for the review! I know it’ll be an unfair comparison but I was wondering if we can compare this mSATA SSD to a Samsung 840 Pro since it’s in the same price range :).
Samsung does not market the 840 Pro as mSATA and their mSATA SSDs are not consumer items so the first hiccup might be warranty if you are concerned with this. Having said that, we reviewed the new PM840 (limited availability on Amazon linked in review) and found it to be an excellent drive. The link can be found here:
https://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-pm841-512gb-msata-ssd-review-performance-and-capacity-in-a-client-ssd/
For the most part, the choice comes down to preference in controller, the Samsung or the Marvell, although Plextor does great work with this controller.
“Although the total RAW memory totals 256GB, and this is the advertised capacity, formatting of the M5M does leave the user with a total of 238GB of available storage space”
You mean 258GiB?
No. I mean GB (gigabytes). Every now and then someone always seems to throw in this same curve which is pretty simple to understand. The total available storage space is 238GB (gigabytes) and can be easily observed by looking at any of the benchmarks that reflect storage space. GiB has absolutely no space in the consumer arena and, actually, should flat out be done away with as it draws a line of confusion that really isn’t necessary. Why lose the understanding of the typical person though right? Thanks for taking the time to read our reports though…appreciated.
I believe it is actually 238GiB formatted capacity. Windows Explorer of course will say that the capacity of the volume is 238GB but it’s a lie because if you convert 250GB into the units of GiB, then it is 238GiB unless it’s a coincidence that formating reduces capacity to 238GB from 250GB.
Microsoft should really fix Explorer so there won’t be any more confusion, like by using base 10 since there units are base 10.
man what u askin ? that’s been decades that drives has less size after installing and formatting .. this is old school mate
Base10 Base2 Base10 Base2
36GB 34.3GB 160GB 152.6GB
40GB 38.1GB 200GB 190.7GB
73GB 69.6GB 250GB 238.4GB
80GB 76.3GB 300GB 286.1GB
100GB 95.4GB 500GB 476.8GB
120GB 114.4GB 750GB 715.3GB
146GB 139.2GB 1000GB 953.7GB
Yes it has less size after formatting and it looks like your conversions from base 10 to base 2 are correct.
But before formatting, a 1TB drive will have more than 953GiB of total storage and more than 1TB of storage. After formatting it’ll have 1TB or 953GiB of storage.
The advertised storage of a hard drive is the storage space available after formatting.
A volume that has 1MB of storage, will have 1.048576MB of storage before formatting, according to the disclaimer on WD’s site. At least I think that is what they mean.
As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes. As used for transfer rate or interface, megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second, megabit per second (Mb/s) = one million bits per second, and gigabit per second (Gb/s) = one billion bits per second.
Hi yeah bcos partitioning takes some space MBR or GPT
And now days win 8 takes even more there is some MB for recovery partition then EFi partition 100MB
for 1TB is 953,674 MB and windows output is 931 GB
here is good expl.
https://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en
Thanks for the review. I just got one of these because it was the only one sold at my local MSY in Canberra. They’re $239 here in Australia, and worth every cent. I can now use those valuable drive bays in my laptop for storage and have this tiny form factor OS drive. Pity it’s only SATA2 on board though and requires a convertor to get the SATA 3 speeds. I’m sure I won’t notice the difference.
Defo there will be notice .. depend what u will be doing .. if u have only SATA II then u should buy cheapest msata or normal SATA II SSD tho
Hi Les,
I have a Lenovo Y580, with a 64GB caching SSD and 1 TB 5400 HDD. Planning to replace the SSD with bigger volume one for the OS and photo editing programs like Lightroom and Capture NX2, and perhaps might put in a 7200 HDD for storage.
Of course I want speed, but I also would like stability, reliability. As far as volumes is concerned, my preference goes out to a 480GB mSata module, but perhaps a 240GB / 256GB might also do.
Money is not an issue up to 512 GB, so what would you recommend in terms of stability (i.o.w. best for data lost protection), Crucial M4 256 / Crucial M500 480GB / Plextor 256 GB / Intel xxx, and still have reasonable speeds?
Regards,
Ozmanguday
I just got 2×256 of these nice SSDs .. waiting for SATA adapter to connect second and will be creating RAID 0
Will be lightning speed !