Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme SSD Review (256GB) – 100,000 IOPS and Excellent Performance

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 ATTO results are almost dead on for listed specifications, remembering of course that ATTO is the manufacturers favorite method of determining SSD specifications because it utilizes highly compressible data, yielding a more optimum result.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. In the M5 Pro Xtreme, we have provided the result with random data samples as both results were extremely similar.

Crystal DiskMark scores traditionally drop just a bit when comparing to ATTO and this is the result of the testing sample now being primarily incompressible data, such data representing movies, music and photographs.  We have also noticed that the all important low 4k random write transfer speed has stepped up a bit since the M5 Pro test of a few weeks back.

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 favored the Plextor M5 Xtreme in more ways than one.  Not only was the Total Score very encouraging, but also, 4k-64Thrd readvIOPS came just under the specifications of 100,000 IOPS. We also found the Copy Bench to be impressive as all three transfer speeds were in the 6Gbps range and the transfer times of the files was lightning fast.