Plextor is introducing its new M6 Pro SSD; with this unit, Plextor has tried to build a very fast, durable SSD, which is complemented by the presence of its PlexTurbo software.
Let’s start with the SSD itself. The M6 Pro looks like a fairly standard 2.5″ SATA3 (6Gb/s) SSD. Inside it we find Toshiba’s 19 nm toggle NAND flash, along with a Marvell 88SS9183 controller. Performance is expected to sit at 545 MB/s for sequential reading, while write speeds can go up to 490 MB/s. The SSD also supports 256-bit AES encryption. Overall, this is very good, but at the end of the day, it’s still limited by the SATA3 (6 Gb/s) interface.
Or is it? To accelerate the unit, Plextor has included the PlexTurbo software, which it has rewritten from scratch for this SSD. This software uses the system’s RAM as caching space, ostensibly allowing performance to jump up by a factor of 10 for cached data. Of course, Plextor recognizes that system crashes or power failures can occur, and has therefore made PlexTurbo use active data comparisons. According to Plextor, this prevents unnecessary writes and prevents data loss during system crashes. How exactly this works remains unknown, so we’re curious to see how this will work in practice.
“To build the M6 PRO, we looked at how storage was used by gamers, creative professionals and advanced system users, then we knew that we had to implement RAM caching as well as delivering on the hardware. Because we started PlexTurbo development from scratch, we’ve been able to optimize it to perform to the maximum with our exact hardware combination and to address the issues that users have experienced with other RAM caching software,” said Sales & Marketing Manager Lear Wu.
Plextor will be releasing M6 Pro SSDs with capacities ranging from 128 GB through 1 TB this month. At this time we don’t have pricing info.
