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THE SSD REVIEW TESTING PROTOCOL
At The SSD Review, we test our SSD’s slightly different depending upon the drive’s marketed purpose, that of a consumer or an enterprise focused SSD. For a consumer SSD, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Benchmarks for our consumer tests are that of fresh drives, so that we can verify that the manufacturer’s specifications match the SSD. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your SSD is top-notch.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.
| PC CHASSIS: | Cooler Master CM Strom Stryker Chassis |
| MOTHERBOARD: | ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard |
| CPU: | Intel i7 3770K CPU |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair H100 CPU Cooler |
| POWER SUPPLY: | be quiet! Dark power Pro 850W |
| SYSTEM COOLING: | be quiet! Silent Wings 2 Chassis Fan |
| MEMORY: | Crucial Ballistix Dual Channel DDR3 Memory |
| GRAPHICS CARD: | N/A |
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software used for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, PCMark Vantage and PCMark 8. In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.
Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.
As you can see above, our sample of the Plextor M6V is equipped with SMART Attributes and TRIM. This was the first time we powered on the drive and it was shipped to us with over 5TB of total NAND writes and 9 power on counts. Let’s see how this will affect performance.
PLEXTOOL & PLEXTURBO
Plextor has their own software for enabling incredible data transfer speeds while utilizing DRAM caching. On the front of the packaging, the M6V advertises that it is capable of reaching 3000 MB/s, but take a look below. Each and every time we tried to load PlexTurbo, we received the same result, no luck.
UPDATE: OCTOBER 6TH 2015
After speaking with Plextor, it turns out our version of PlexTurbo was an update behind. We recommend heading over to the following site where you can find the most up to date version of the PlexTurbo software. We ignored the “Not Compatible With Windows 10” warning and ran the software on our test bench. Take a look at Crystal Disk Mark below, which simply boosts performance from the listed speeds.
Thanks for the heads up on this. It looks worth a shot if is comes down from the current Amazon and Egg price offerings. I’m not going to hold my breath though since I don’t think of the aggressive pricing you hope for as being a part of the usual Plextor game plan.
Any idea what the P/E numbers are on these 15nm toggle NAND ?
Probobly 2000-3000 p/e.
Although p/e is not the only measure of endurance.