PERFORMANCE
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus V Formula
Memory: Kingston HyperX Predator DDR3-2400
Storage: Plextor M5Pro Xtreme 256GB
PSU: Seasonic X-760W
Cooling: Corsair H100 (Max)
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Plextor rates the M5Pro Xtreme 256GB at 540/470MBs for read and write respectively. ATTO shows us that read performance is meets and even exceeds the specified read speed by a bit although write performance does seems to meet the mark by a couple of MBs. Still, these are very impressive numbers.
For potential write testing, HD Tune was used to measure the drive’s write performance. Again, we focus on the average results for real-world relevance.
Focusing on average write results, the Plextor M5Pro Xtreme makes mincemeat out of everything else in the list ousting our current top choice SSD by over 20MB.
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo†of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
Crystal Dismark paints a more detailed picture on what to expect from the M5Pro Xtreme. Sequential performance is incredible, showcasing how much the SSD can offer in the best conditions. Small file operation isn’t as impressive as our other SSDs though.
AS SSDÂ is a benchmark tool that determines the performance of Solid State Drives but can also be used to measure hard drives, it just takes longer. The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests .
Pretty similar scenario to the earlier test. Still proves that the sequential performance really makes this SSD a beast.
We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,310 files for 3.34GB.
With a lot of small files, the Plextor M5Pro Xtreme takes a hit until it reaches our larger files where it gets a solid edge in performance.
To measure boot-up time we used BootRacer. BootRacer is a free program that measures Windows boot-up times.
Boot-up is right up the top of our charts rivalling the HyperX SSD. All these results are impressive by themselves so seeing the M5Pro Xtreme break to the top means we need to update our database with more current selection.
We hook-up a meter to our SSD and see how much it pulls from the PSU during idle and simultaneous read/write load.
If there’s one aspect of SSDs that need to get much more attention, it’s their power draw. Looking at the chart above, we can see all our SSDs are below 1w during idle. At load, the Plextor eats up around 4w which is quite low and would easily fit in a green PC optimized for power saving.