The Plextor M3 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 5, 2012 3:05 AM ESTPower Consumption
Plextor shipped us the 256GB model, which is perfect for power comparisons.
The idle power consumption is roughly half of what the Crucial m4 and Intel SSD 320 consume, and less than half when looking at SF-2281 based SSDs like the Vertex 3 and Intel SSD 520. This time it's not just firmware related, though—it's NAND. All the drives in the above graph except the M4 and Samsung SSD 830 use synchronous NAND (ONFi 2.x). As Anand explained in our OCZ Agility 3 review, synchronous NAND is tied to a clock signal. That signal is continuous and hence it constantly uses power, leading to a higher idle power consumption. Toggle-Mode NAND has no active clock signal and hence its DQS signal only uses power during read and write operarions.
For read and write loads, the Plextor M3 appears similar to Intel as they consume more power during sequential write than random write. That's good news because most I/O operations are at least moderately random, so focusing on low random I/O power consumption should result in lower overall power consumption. It's all up to one's workload, of course.
113 Comments
View All Comments
yyrkoon - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
". Not the end user, not even their good reputation"Er . . .
No concern for the end user, or even their good reputation:
sunsin - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link
Kristian, Thanks for the clarification. One further question, in the Intel 520 review, the performance of Sandforce based SSD after TRIM cannot recover to clean state. Isn't this something of concern? The M3 can recovery its clean state performance either via GC or TRIM but this is not possible with Sandforce based SSD. Would this count as one strength on M3's Truespeed implementation?falk09 - Sunday, April 22, 2012 - link
It's mentioned that the Razor Blade had a Lite-On SSD. Lite-on and Philips "owns" the Plextor-brandname when it comes to this types of products - under the PLDS-name - see /www.pldsnet.com. The Lite-On SSDs are the same as the Plextor SSDs. So it's more that Plextor is a high-end marketing-name for Lite-On?Plextors M3P should be reviewed. Great SSD. Fastest of the Marvell-based SSD it seems...