Plextor Introduces M6Pro SSDs
Plextor has introduced its latest series of SSDs, the M6 Pro series, during Computex. For now, the solid state drives come exclusively with a performance-enhancing tool called PlexTurbo.
The M6 Pro series does not differ significantly from the previously released M5 Pro series: both series of SSDs use 19nm NAND that is controlled by a Marvell controller. The distinguishing factor of the M6 Pro series, however, is the included PlexTurbo software, which is currently available exclusively for these latest SSDs. With the software, the sata bottleneck must be passed by using caching.
PlexTurbo can be switched on and off at will and, if active, uses the available working memory of the PC and the onboard cache of the SSD. For example, frequently used data must be available to the operating system much faster: during a demonstration, speeds of up to almost 3000MB/s for sequential operations were achieved in AS-SSD. With compressible data, the drives were even able to store data at more than 5000MB/s. How that translates into real-world performance, however, remains to be tested.
In the future, the software may also be made suitable for other series, probably in combination with a firmware update. For the time being, the M6 Pro, as a 2.5″ drive or M.2 version, is the only series with the accelerating software. The prices of the drives for the M.2 version will be 119 euros for the 128GB version The 256GB drives will cost EUR 215. The price for the 512GB version was not yet known.