Plextor M6e Black Edition PCI Express SSD Review

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, 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.

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, and PCMark Vantage.  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 6.1.8

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.

When taking a look at Crystal Disk Info, we can see that the M6e Black Edition features the S.M.A.R.T. attribute, which allows for us to monitor the health of the SSD over its lifespan, as well as TRIM. We would like to point out that this PCIe SSD was previously tested over on The SSD Review, this explains the increased amount of reads, writes, power on counts and hours. With this being said, we may experience a slight decrease in performance, but nothing overly significant.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

Our first benchmark tests shows us that the M6e Black Edition has read speeds of up to 739 MB/s, as well as write speeds of up to 580 MB/s, which is right around the listed specifications given to us by Plextor.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (oFill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music. We run the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data. Since results typically return with nearly identical scores, we only include the results for random data samples.

Crystal Disk Mark uses incompressible data in order to test the transfer speeds of the M6e Black Edition. Incompressible data is that of videos and pictures, which cannot be compressed as easily as documents. The read and write speeds have returned with a slightly lower read speed, but a slight increase in write speed.