Plextor M5S 256GB SATA 3 SSD Review – True Speed Through and Through

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

Initial performance results exceed listed specificvations for both read and write transfer speeds and we see highs f 534MB/s read and 405MB/s write.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 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. We are testing with Random or highly incompressible data samples for the M5S as this drive does not use compression in storage and test results are very similar regardless of the data sample in use, compressible or incompressible.

Once again we see some excellent high sequential performance, however, it would have been nice to see low 4k random write performance a bit higher than 59MB/s as we see most new SSDs today somewhere in the area of 90MB/s.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.6

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data.  AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the worst case scenario in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

AS SSD brings about some new values and some very low disk access times are very nice to see as these translate into visible performance.  Consistency in both read and write IOPS at a high level is another positive with the Plextor M5S.