Hardware Award
Plextor M3 PRO 256GB SSD RRP: $299.99 | Website: www.goplextor.com Test Machine • Intel Core i7 3770K • GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H • SEAGATE 7200.12 500GB • ANTEC HCP 1200 • Windows 7 64-bit SPI
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he M3 Pro drive as the name suggests is an even faster version of the M3 drive from Plextor. The changes in the drive electronics and firmware are what net the additional performance we see. On average the drive is about 10% faster. That may not seem like much but if you look at the write speed for instance, you can appreciate just how much faster 10% can be over an already fast drive. This was the only drive we’ve tested that’s managed to break the 400MB/s sequential write speed barrier. We were
12 The OverClocker Issue 20 | 2012
already impressed by the previous drive but the M3 PRO blew it out the water. The performance increase was maintained throughout the duration of the entire testing suit. Where we saw an anomaly was with the 4K write performance numbers as the PRO drive was a little slower. However given that it was a 3.71% difference in performance we are fairly confident that this could be standard testing variance and it’s nothing to worry about. At worst the M3 PRO should offer identical performance to the original M3 drive. Other than that, the performance scaled accordingly. In IOMETER’s IOPS test we were close to seeing 30K IOPS which is significant as it’s over 2,000 points higher than what the original drive delivered. The best part about this
drive is that right now it can be had for as little as $299.99 which is much lower than what the original M3 retailed for when it was new. Granted NAND prices have plummeted, it does however mean that we can enjoy higher performance SSDs for lower prices. So as it stands if you felt that the $339 of the previous drive was more than fair, then you should rejoice at the opportunity to own a refined version of the drive at an appreciably lower price. Taking a look at the internals of the drive, we see that there are some changes that Plextor has made which are obviously part of the reason why the performance has gone up. The M3 PRO drive comes outfitted with 2x256MB Nanya DDR3 DRAM chips for a total of 512MB. Identical in size to the cache on the regular