Plextor M3 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2012 1:45 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011, Light Workload
Our new light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric). The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers:
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011—Light Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
IO Size | % of Total | |||
4KB | 27% | |||
16KB | 8% | |||
32KB | 6% | |||
64KB | 5% |
Switching to Light suite doesn't change the story; the M3 Pro is still a brilliant performer. Only the Kingston HyperX 3K is faster, but once again the 0.6MB/s difference is insignificant.
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Coup27 - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
I agree. I welcome another SSD toolbox into the mix, but with its current feature set, it is largely pointless. Manual TRIM for a toolbox utility is essential.I presume that Samsung make Toshiba's NAND for them? I did not know that.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
Samsung and Toshiba both make their own NAND. Toshiba does have a joint venture with SanDisk though (similar to what Intel and Micron are doing).Coup27 - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
"The NAND is once again from Toshiba and there are a total of eight NAND packages on the PCB. These are 32GiB quad-die packages and are manufactured using Samsung's 24nm process"I don't understand this then?
Kristian Vättö - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
That's a typo/error. Fixed now :-)csroc - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
At least the author knows who Plextor is this time!pheadland - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
OCZ also has an SSD toolbox, and it more functionality than the Plextor one.Belard - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
Last time I checked... its just a ROM/FIRMWARE upgrade tool.Hence, I buy and tell friends to get Intel drives. I'll gladly pay the extra $20~30 for the reliability, support and upper-class performance. Sure its NOT #1, but I'll take a slight performance hit over BSODs and full out failures.
I had to explain to a client his SSD that Dell installed in his high end Dell is a Samsung that doesn't support TRIM... its new enough to be SATA3/6Gbs - and yet its performance is already SLOWER than my own intel G2 M25 drive (SATA 2).
The Intel tool box if full featured. 3.0x is quite nice.
KAlmquist - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
I ask because the write performance of SSD's can vary a lot depending on how full the drive is. The Vertex 4 even uses a different block allocation algorithm if the drive is less than half full.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
Storage Bench is run on a clean drive.KAlmquist - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
So it measures how the drives perform when they have a lot of free space. Thanks.