Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Plextor has a nice price competitive offering with the M7V series, price however outweighs performance as the choice of Toggle TLC based NAND will not bring these products towards a performance level in writes that we have become accustomed to. Realistically though the SSD series is as fast as what you may expect from a good SSD, only when you reach workloads that require writing gigabytes of data does the performance go down significantly. For 90% of your typical PC usage including gaming, that write performance drop is just not an issue as even in a worst case scenario your performance drops to 160~225 MB/sec. You can pick up a 256GB model for roughly 70 EURO, which is very nice. The 512GB models we tested sit at roughly 145 EURO, not bad at all. The Plextor M7V series works nicely when it comes to sheer read performance as it can easily keep up with the competition and remains at or over that 500 MB/sec marker. And if you use your PC or laptop in a normal fashion such as for the internet and gaming, these SSDs will still obviously be plenty fast. Write performance in several segments however will drop if you are writing more than several GBs continuously. But let's face it, who does that on a regular basis?

So, under normal usage and workloads you will not notice that side effect of TLC based NAND, most of your saved data hits the DRAM cache first and then gets written on a chunk of SLC. However if you are actively writing massive workloads often, this SSD series is not for you. The IOPS performance screams out loud and proud above 100K on 4K random aligned reads, but writes are just half of that. Our trace testing shows pretty okay results as well. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC with spicy workloads focused on reads mostly. Sequential and sustained writes are good until they access TLC, copying a massive ISO or MKV file thus will drop down to values below 200 MB/sec after you pass roughly 4GB.

One note on the M.2 SSD though, as insignificant as it sounds... a green PCB color is just a no-go anno 2016, we solemnly wish that manufacturers pick up on this, we need M.2 units with a black PCB as 98% of the motherboards out there have a black PCB.

Overall

Right, An SSD is enjoyable. Very much so. If you put a drive like this into your SATA 3 compatible laptop or SATA 3 compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series. Make no mistake, replacing an HDD with an SSD in your desktop PC or laptop eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That, combined with the performance SATA 3 offers these days, is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2016.

Controller

Some overall recommendations then. Should you be in the market for a SATA 3 SSD then we have a couple of hints. First and foremost if you have a SATA 2 controller only on your motherboard, then you'll be limited at roughly 270 MB/sec read and writes. SATA 3 (6Gbps) will free you up from that allowing the SSD to perform in the 500 MB/sec range. It is however important that you connect your SSD to the proper controller. We absolutely prefer the performance of the Intel Series 6 and 7 (H67/P67/Z68/Z77/H77/Z87/X79/H97/Z97/X99/H170/Z170) integrated SATA 6G controller over anything else available in the market. If you run the SSD from a 3rd party controller like say, a Marvell 6G controller, you will see lower performance. The new AMD 85X and 900 chipsets also offer fantastic performance. The more recent Asmedia controllers we spotted lately on motherboards also offer good performance, albeit still 20% ~ 25% slower than Intel's controllers. Also make sure you run your drive in AHCI mode, it does make such a difference in performance, a big difference.

Concluding

The M7V series is all about value, less about enthusiast class performance. Read performance throughout the test session is comparable and up-to snuff with the competition in the 500 MB/sec range, writes are plenty fast up-to the point where you need to write huge and massively sized multi-GB files. If that remains to be an issue for you, you will need to spend more money on an SSD with another NAND flash type, that is the compromise for a value SSD.

The final MSRP prices just arrived:

M7VC/M7VG - MSRP

• 128GB 45.00 (US$)
• 256GB 73.75 (US$)
• 512GB 131.25 (US$)

So that's 26 cents per GB for the 512GB model, 28 cents for the 256GB model and 35 cents for the small 128GB model. As far as I am concerned, Plextor could have probably skipped that 128GB model as that format is becoming more irrelevant. Instead they should probably have added a 1TB model of this drive. At roughly 25 cents per GB it would be an awesome SSD with plenty of storage. But clearly the tested 512 GB model is very price competitive. Prices for the 2.5" and M.2 units are similar btw. 

As such we do have to acknowledge that this is a value series SSD, among the cheapest ones you can find. Hence the price performance ratio is really good. For our tested 512GB model / volume size / 320TBW / three years is guaranteed under warranty. The warranty plan itself is fine really, simple carry-in. 320TBW = a write allowance of 292 GB per day (for the 512GB model), 146 GB per day for the 256GB model and 73 GB per day for the 128GB model. That's more than enough for many many years under normal conditions. Power consumption is a notch on the high side if you were planning to use one in a laptop at close to 4 Watts, then again an HDD inside a laptop uses more. Plextor will release three models, 128/256/512GB, albeit that 512GB version at just 131 bucks certainly seems to be a steal. 

Concluding, if your workload lines up towards gaming or regular usage on an internet PC, then we have to admit, this is looking to be a great value deal. If you purchase a larger capacity SSD, your guaranteed lifespan for writes increases significantly. However, if you have nasty writing workloads you'll need to step up to a more expensive model. In 9 out of 10 cases you should be fine, and that is the truth. We can recommend the M7V as a great value SSD series.