Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

As you have been able to see, the numbers that the M9PeG return are very impressive, especially when looking at overall performance averaged out over all types of workloads, this SSD averages out incredibly well. The new 64-layer Vertically stacked TLC Toggle Mode written NAND in combination with the Marvell controller and a DRAM cache reveal 3GB/s reads in certain workloads, and sure 2 GB/s in specific writes. The development rate and curve of current NVMe and regular NAND flash-based storage technologies are simply staggering.

I just looked it up, it was nearly 10 years ago in 2008 that we reviewed the first SSD. It was 32GB and would cost you 349 USD. The read performance was ~150MB/sec at the time, which was just staggering. It had no cache and connected to a regular SATA connector. How things have changed from that  ' blisteringly fast' 150 MB/sec towards numbers that are 20 to 30 fold of that whilst offering more capacity, reliability, endurance, and performance. Prices have been coming down, reliability has been top notch and ever so importantly volume sizes have moved upwards to a level where now 1TB SSDs are getting a norm slowly. The current new mainstream is roughly 512GB which offers a nice balance in between performance and value. Plextor skipped the 128GB version, as for most consumers that want the NVMe experience that is just a too small volume size to work with. Now, I have stated it a number of times already, I really would like to see motherboards to design and make move to SATA4, rapidly, to be able to keep up with M2 form factors and the NVMe protocol. The Plextor M9Pe offers seriously fast performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At just over 1 or even 2 GB/s writes per seconds it is easily three times faster compared to that mainstream SATA3 SSD, while topping 3 GB/s reads (!) and thus over quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD. Combined with a 5-year warranty you should be good to go for a long time. Currently, I am lacking TBE values. I have requested these.

Performance

The new M9Pe storage units are fast and strong, on all levels really, IOPS performance is good, easily over 200K. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we feel that one of the best tests in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the M9Pe is exceptionally good. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent as advertised. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big MKV movies or do it all together. 

Pricing & Warranty

Plextor will able to keep the prices very competitive, but obviously a unit this fast is more expensive opposed to a regular SATA3 SSD. There are street prices in the initial launch wave. Prices are as below (ex VAT).

Overall NAND Storage Usage

Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your 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; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the Plextor M9Pe will perform seriously fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing an HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 / mSATA offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2018.

Plextor will give you a 5-year warranty period and below listed are the TBW values for M9Pe series.

• 256GB: 160 Terabyte
• 512GB: 320 Terabyte
• 1TB: 640 Terabyte
   

Concluding

Toshiba will be doing well with their new 64-layer Vertically stacked NAND, and the add-in partners benefit from that. The Plextor M9Pe series will offer great performance at an acceptable price level. For many TLC is a bit of a dirty word endurance wise (albeit I consider that an overrated in the year 2018), so you'll be very happy with this TLC written SSD and yes, MLC is more expensive compared to TLC writes for obvious reasons. Plextor does use a fairly dated controller here and has to rely on SLC caches to keep long workloads up-to-snuff, but is succeeding greatly. To compensate a little on TLC endurance, Plextor will give you a 5-year warranty on this product series, and that in technology land is a might nice warranty to have. HDD, regular SATA SSD or NVMe M2? It remains to be a topic of much discussion in our forums. Here's my take on that; going from a HDD towards an SSD is a huge difference. Even with the slowest SATA3 SSD, you can find, the access times will make a tremendous difference as you do not have a mechanical magnetic head seeking data on platters. HDDs, however, are still relevant, for big storage and perhaps games. But for your OS a proper fast SATA3 SSD in the 400~500 MB/sec range already is golden. Some, however, want that platinum experience, going from a fast SATA3 SSD towards NVMe M2 again is a much faster step, but less noticeable compared to that regular SATA3 SSD, as you already have the fast access times and split-second application loading. You'll benefit greatly from NVMe SSD storage units if you have the workloads for it, writing continuously, video editing and so on. For just gaming and OS functionality, however, the differences are too small too measure, as then other things in your PC are the bottleneck, your PC for example, or the calculation time a game needs to set up a scene. That will be the discussion of the years to come, how fast do SSDs really need to be? Storage technology not evolving would mean us still be in the stone-age technology wise. That said and done, the Plextor M9Pe is mighty impressive. You will easily quadruple your read performance over a regular SATA3 SSD. For writes that is easily triple the performance of today's SATA3 solutions. Remember, there are requirements for proper M.2 usage though. You do need to use the right combination of OS/UEFI motherboard and CPU, we do recommend X99/X299 and Z87/Z97/Z170/Z270/X370 and for AMD Z370/X399 or newer gear here. Check with your motherboard manufacturers if the board can support M.2 with four PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0) and NVMe. Almost any modern one, can. I'll mention it again, the Plextor M9Pe series receives a very nice five-year carry-in warranty. Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net pc usage (albeit overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is by far one of the faster SSD series available for I/O intensive workloads, consumer grade that is. The Plextor M9Pe M2 SSD units make your PC fly relatively seen for your storage performance requirements, and comes recommended by Guru3D.com 

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