Plextor M6e Black Edition SSD Review (256GB) – Back in Black!

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

Again in Crystal Disk Mark, sequential read maxes out at 722MB/s and writes are able to hit just shy of rated spec at 579MB/s. However, now we can see that the 4K read and write speeds are 37MB/s and 105MB/s respectfully.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.7

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance.  For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

Moving along to AS SSD we can see that the Plextor M6e was able to achieve an overall score of 1361, which is quite impressive, however both read and write speeds are lower than rated spec. Reads max out at 673MB/s and writes hit 542MB/s. In terms of IOPS we can see it is able to hit just over 100K for read and well over the rated spec for write at 118K!

This AS SSD Copy Bench test is a true to life evaluation of performance as AS SSD creates three files (ISO/Program/Game), and simply moves them from one part of the SSD to another, recording their top speed and total transfer time. Results prove to surpass the SATA 6Gb/s barrier for ISO performance reaching 664MB/s. The other speeds are also quite impressive staying in the 400-500MB/s range.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today.  The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times.  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 use in our benchmark testing.

In Anvil Storage Utilities the 256GB Plextor M6e Black Edition scored 5,070 points. Max sequential read speeds reach 669MB/s and sequential write comes in at 546MB/s. 4K speeds prove similar to the other benchmarks, 35MB/s for read and 102MB/s for write. Again, the sequential performance is just not up to the rated spec we expected.

Finally in Anvil, we tried to push IOPS performance to the max and the results are above. Reads are just shy of 103K and writes are just over.