Gadgetory

excellent hey everybody and welcome back to Pauls hardware another dining room table edition today I'm going to be taking a look at this SSD but first I have a question for you guys because I've done some SSD videos in the past and they tend to get I don't know pretty standard I'm going to show some benchmarks on here I'm going to compare it to some other SSDs in its range but for you guys at home if you want leave me in comments what types of videos you'd like to see with SSDs apart from just raw benchmark numbers we've seen the take and SSD and installed in a system or a laptop that has a mechanical drive and see how much faster it is that's cool but it's been done many times before so if you've got any ideas for me please feel free to leave them but that said let's take a look this is the plextor m5 pro xstream it's available 128 256 and 512 gig versions I've got the 256 here and I'm going to just do a quick unboxing and then show you guys some benchmarks first off so millimeter heights so you can install it in slimmer notebooks and possibly even ultrabooks depending on the configuration of your ultra ultra books totally hundred thousand I ops reaching breakthrough in speed which means if you look at input/output operations per second which is a popular SSD benchmarking number to use you should hit a hundred thousand with this we'll see if that's true true speed true protects etc say 26 gigabits per second 2.5 inch you get a 3.5 inch bracket there's look at the back you do get some software along with this that's inside there you can download to help clone or copy if you're going from an existing drive high-performance synchronous mlc nand flash it's actually toshiba 90 nanometer two bits per cell NAND flash using 16 kilobyte page sizes there's also some DRAM cash for for for caching that's good to have here's a closer look at the performance numbers according to plextor that you should be able to achieve with this drive so as you can see different numbers depending on what version that you're currently testing I should be able to hit five hundred forty megabytes per second on the read 460 megabytes per second on the right see if those numbers stand up it's more information there if you guys want to take a look MTBF wait operational temperature and whatnot alright so the first thing that we are faced with is this which I have already put some tape over this is the NT is SD solution suite go to NCI corpcom in that URL use these codes you can get an NT I echo and NCI backup now so that's cool added software I'm not going to be demoing the software for today's video I want to focus on the fsd you do get a plextor 3.5 inch drive bay adapter which is always nice to have if you're dropping this into an older system that doesn't have two and a half inch drive mounts screws for the drive bay adapter that's handy here's the drive itself inside the electromagnetic shielded packaging plastic thing we've got the drive so I'm aesthetically pretty simple kind of a nice silver brushed metal which if you happen to be placing your SSD in a position in your case where it's visible which I recommend doing since these are kind of premium items it should blended pretty nice there's a look at front and back again plextor info and an FCC stuff and that sort of thing they're pretty standard and then of course your CL et data and power connectors as you might expect I'm actually going to take this Drive apart really quick let's see if I can do it while I keep talking there this is going to void my warranty so as always don't do this if you purchase the drive yourself I am returning this to plextor once this video is done so they will have a voided warranty I don't maybe they can put any stick around it or something the stickers right there i'm just going to peel it off and with the last screw removed we should be able to get into the drives housing i always like to do this with SSDs just because it's it's fun i guess i like looking at the internals of things i like seeing how things are connected how one piece is wired to the next piece and what not and if you're amin in particular if you're showing an SSD to somebody who's that has no idea what the heck in s even is I find it to be helpful okay because basically what you got is like if you if you compare this to a mechanical drive mechanical drives you'll be able to see a PCB on there and that has a controller and that's then it connects up to the mechanical elements of a mechanical drive but basically with the with SSD you got the same thing it's just they extends the PCB and then that allows them to put the nand flash on there and then that takes the place of the spinning elements of a mechanical drive which is pretty cool but let me explain what we're looking at right here first off the controller which is this kind of big square chip right there again that's a marvel around enough I already said it yet but that's a Marvel 88 ss9 187 code name is Monet it's an eight channel controller so if you think about that like you might figure a raid configuration this can sing that can communicate with eight of these nan chips at a time and of course it switches back and forth between all of them very quickly the other thing is that this is not a sandforce controlled drive san force drives have been very popular they still are to me sandforce drives have kind of fallen out of all an out of love with them to some extent because in order to hit the peak performance of a sand forest drive you really need to be using compressible data and not all data is compressible so I'm I've taken a liking to some of the newer drives like these that aren't using sand force or at least i'm waiting for lsi sandforce to release a new controller but again this is a this is a marvel one it does have custom firmware and designed by plextor to handle the management of all of NAND flash storage it's on there NAND flash storage itself is you might be able to see from the toshiba logo toshiba nant 90 nanometer two bits per cell that's mlc nand again 16 kilobyte package sizes and then right up here you got some DRAM so it's another difference from sandforce controller sandforce controllers will use part of the nand's for caching whereas this Marvel controller actually has discrete DRAM chips and you get a total of 512 megabytes of that so it's going to write their store hot data temporarily to this or if it's doing trim commands or that sort of thing for garbage collection it will it will utilize that and i find it makes a pretty good solution you do have 16 of those nand packages as you can see it on the front eight on the back and that's a quick look at the drive itself next up we're going to take a look at some benchmarks and we're going to be comparing this to a few drives that I happen to like right now the 840 Evo from Samsung the neutron GTX from corsair and the ocz vector all in the 242 256 gigabyte range so we're starting off here with a look at a SSD and sorry this is a bit clutter but up on the top we have the overall score as well as read and write score the Plex store is the blue and it's hanging them right in there with all the other drives lower left is accessed time it's thousands or hundreds of a millisecond so everything's pretty much equal there and then on the lower right you have I ops and in that test the plextor was second only to the ocz vector in this particular test but very good scores overall next up we have a tow a very popular test I just took the peak read and peak right across all the tests in this one the plextor scored very nicely again 547 on the read & 4 55 on the right finally crystal disk mark and again here the flexor is in the blue so 522 for sequential read about 450 for sequential right and then there on the 4k queue depth 30 to read I ops it's hitting the projected hundred thousand or just just shy of at ninety-nine thousand 75 in this particular one but it won that one over all the others and then again very good score of 85 thousand for 4k queued up 32 right so in closing the plextor m5 pro xstream is a very fast SSD like many of the current gen high-end SSDs it's really bumping up against the serial ata six gigabits per second bandwidth limitation so that's what I've been finding so a lot of the high-end SSDs will perform within just a few points of each other the one thing I will say about this drive right now I've compared its pricing wise to the other drives that I showed you guys in the comparison those are selling for about one hundred and ninety-two $200 right now this one I was only able to find for about two hundred and thirty bucks so that would be my one complaint about this in review is that I think the price does need to come down a little bit to be competitive with those other drives but that is something that can be changed either by retailers over I plextor so hopefully that will happen as well to make this one a little bit more competitive apart from that very happy at the performance throughput numbers overall it was able to hit well not a hundred thousand I ops as it says on the box but 99,000 so you know what can you do and I'm sure with a little bit of finagling you could probably easily get it over a hundred thousand you might just need to tweak a few of the settings and that sort of thing depending on your benchmark but that's all for this video very good drive just a little bit a little bit high in the price thank you very much for watching you guys again if you have any suggestions for interesting things that you might consider to show doing with an SSD for future videos I'd be really happy to hear those go ahead and leave me a comment in the comment section down below or maybe just to like or dislike depending on how you thought about this video and we'll see you all in the next pulse hardware video