Plextor M6e Black Edition Besting the SATA 6Gbps competition Review

Hidden under a sleek black cover, with standout red heatsink, the M6e has a rather standard AHCI PCIe M.2 SSD. With the integrated cooling solution clamped over the drive (and a ‘warranty void if removed sticker’ adorning the screws) plus an extra SATA power connector, it’s more than just a PCIe slot adaptor. But still, if you have a suitable PCIe M.2 slot on your motherboard, the SSD could be plugged in directly. This is handy, as it means you could use the drive without taking up an extra PCIe slot if you upgrade your motherboard. Our test SSD had a 256GB capacity, made up of Toshiba MLC NAND coupled to a Marvell 88SS9183 controller working through a PCIe x2 interface. Sequential read and write speeds of 637MB/s and 556MB/s are a cut above SATA SSDs, but not by a huge margin. It’s worth noting that the lower-capacity SSDs have slower write speeds, while the larger ones tend to give a performance boost. The Plextor SSD comes with a Turbo software tool that can use 25% of your system RAM as a drive cache to boost performance. It also supports AES-256 data encryption, but no endurance fi gure is given. The smaller 128GB Plextor SSD costs $220, which isn’t a particularly good deal over the $349 for the 256GB version we tested. The larger 512GB M6e is hard to fi nd, but offers a slightly better price per gigabyte ratio at $660. All the Plextor drives offer a full fi ve-year warranty