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
T
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 2 0 | 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