Compared to mSATA SSDs, M.2 PCIE SSDs have far more potential in the desktop market. mSATA has a much lower bandwidth limit than M.2. In fact, M.2 utilizes the PCIE lanes to transfer data which means much higher potential. Also, while mSATA is limited to its own little port, M.2 PCIE SSDs can be plugged into PCIE adapter cards. giving older systems a boost in performance, or it can provide an additional slot for fast storage when the main slot on the motherboard is already in use. Although M.2 PCIE SSDs currently come in x2, x4, how much faster are they in real life? That’s why we have the Plextor PX-G256M6e in our lab today to find out!
Features and Specifications
What makes this thing tick? Two components do the bulk of the work – the system’s PCIE bus carrying all the bandwidth and a Marvell 88S9183 dual-core controller. The controller reads and writes non-volatile data to 8 x 32GB 19nm Toshiba NAND chips which totals 256GB on the PX-G256M6e device. Future models may implement different NAND which is no big deal as long as the performance is the same, or is improved. A single 512MB Nanya DDR3 RAM chip acts as cache to support the controller functions.
The PX-G256M6e supports TRIM, SMART, and NCQ to manage storage cells to improve performance. Surprisingly, the device also has AES 256 encryption to keep data relatively safe. Whether or not that is successful ultimately depends on the tenacity and time of the hacker.
In terms of pricing, the PX-G256M6e retails for around the $220 US price range, which is priced competitively with other PCIE SSD solutions, but is a premium over standard SATA3 SSDs in the market at the same capacity. However, M.2 PCIE SSDs do have an advantage in speed, which we’ll be looking at closely.
Installation and Interface
Intel Z97 and X99 motherboards are the latest platforms to offer an M.2 slot. For best performance, match x-gen SSD to x-gen port on your motherboard or expansion card. Otherwise, your M.2 device will scale back automatically, similarly to PCI Express slots when you put a slower card in there.That said, during installation the Plextor PX-G256M6e worked perfectly with the x4 gen slot on an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard.
The Plextor PX-G256M6e also showed good compatibility with the bundled adapter card on the ASUS X99 Deluxe board. That means that if you have an older generation system without an M.2 slot, you can still take advantage of the performance with a similar adapter card. A fine solution for anyone still on an Intel X58 system that refuses to die.
In terms of installation, basically, slide the golden fingers into the slot, then tighten down with a small screw. Upon boot up, if you see a Plextor splash screen, then you know your M6e elite M.2 SSD is working well. Sometimes, you’ll see the screen for a couple seconds and other times for longer, but we’re not exactly sure why. However, once booted into Windows, you can treat it like any other drive, format it, and put it to use.
If you’re using it as your system drive, you’ll just have to set the drive as your first boot up device and you’re good to go.
Test Systems
In order to test the Plextor PX-G256M6e fully, we devised two systems based on the latest chipsets to support M.2 PCIE SSDs onboard.
Intel X99 Test System
- Processor: Core i7-5960X Haswell-E
- Motherboard 1: ASUS X99 Deluxe
- Storage M.2: Plextor PX-G256M6e x4 Gen
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2800MHz DDR4
Intel Z97 Test System
- Processor: Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon
- Motherboard 2: GIGABYTE GA-Z97-UD5H Gold
- Storage M.2: Kingston SM2280S3/120G x2 Gen
- Memory: Kingston HyperX Beast 16GB 2133MHz DDR3
Shared components included an ASUS STRIX GTX 750 Ti 2GB OC video card, optional ASUS PCIE M.2 x4 expansion card, be quiet! DarkPowerPro 850W 80Plus Gold power supply, and Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD. Both systems were fully patched under Windows 7 Ultimate, with the latest drivers and BIOS for all components available at the time of testing. Let’s start benching!
Benchmark Results
Individual tests were performed using CrystalDiskMark, ATTO, and BlackMagic benchmarks. The results revealed there was virtually no performance difference between the small integrated M.2 port and an M.2 expansion card, which bodes well for folks looking to upgrade to faster storage on older systems without M.2 support onboard. Lets look at the scores for clarification..
CrystalDiskMark
Compared to the Kingston x2 M.2 SSD, the Plextor x4 M.2 SSD is fast! It’s definitely more than 250 MB/s faster reading and 80 MB/s writing sequentially. 4K performance doesn’t seem much better but 9 to 18 MB/s more a second means even better overall responsiveness when launching apps and doing anything disk intensive on the desktop. It’s safe to say that the Plextor PX-G256M6e will manage larger files more quickly in the end, with those SATA3 crushing speeds.
ATTO – Disk Benchmark
Overlapped IO performance reveals how responsive the Plextor PX-G256M6e is. Its read performance out-paces anything we have in the lab that isn’t using this technology. However, the 4K read and write performance are much like the Kingston M.2 x2 and Fury SSDs. This is no doubt due to controller tuning as there’s often a trade off between small and large block performance. With M.2 PCIE SSDs still being fairly new, there may be room to extract a bit more performance in future firmware updates.
BlackMagic Disk Speed Test
This is one of our newer benchmarks that truly gives a real time performance indication of storage. The Plextor PX-G256M6e is fast enough to read and write almost all 1080p high quality video by BlackMagic’s standards. There’s so much bandwidth needed for something like this that it’s impressive to see a single device measure up so well. The only way to ensure that with technology before M.2 PCIE SSDs was to run high performance SSDs in RAID, which take up much more room than a single M.2 PCIE SSD solution.
Final Thoughts
Most every SSD, whether standard SATA, mSATA, or PCIE SSD device will all transform the performance of your computer, and turn it in to a more efficient tool for handling large media, apps and data. Not only do our systems boot much faster, but all programs load up more quickly, and are more responsive, thanks to the large amounts of bandwidth readily available. The Plextor PX-G256M6e 256GB M.2 SSD is no exception offering more bandwidth than any conventional SATA3 solution on the market.
In terms of real world benefits, boot times were very similar to many of the performance SATA3 SSDs in our lab, but just a couple seconds quicker due to the 4K data block performance increase. The real magic will be evident when you’re working on large data intensive projects, even launching very large games and apps. And when it comes to moving around data that is highly sensitive to lag, like a high bit rate 1080p video stream, this solution makes even more sense. And the best part is, the solution can be retrofitted to older systems that are still very powerful, but may not have access to faster storage solutions of today.
The Plextor PX-G256M6e is a great high performance M.2 SSD solution, and at $220 US/CA (Newegg/Amazon), the unit is competitive with other similar offerings, but isn’t quite as affordable as SATA3 SSDs at the same capacity. So you have to weigh the benefits of performance with the benefits of capacity.
Currently, the PX-G256M6e works best with an x4 M.2 slot found on more expensive Intel X99 motherboards or in a PCIE expansion card. In fact, if Plextor bundled their PCIE adapter card by default, that would make it a much more accessible product to users with all levels of systems, but may lack this one solution that removes the storage bottleneck.
But for now, the Plextor PX-G256M6e offers extremely high performance, encryption with negligible performance loss, and excellent compatibility with today’s (and yesterday’s) high performance systems.
Pros
- Great all around performance
- Faster than standard SATA3 or mSATA SSDs
- Encryption onboard
- Compatible with every platform tested so far
Cons
- Priced significantly higher than SATA3 SSDs of similar capacity
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
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