The Plextor M9Pe NVMe SSD Review: Teaching An Old Chip New Tricks

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The average data rates from the Plextor M9Pe on the Light test again show it taking less of a performance hit from being full than what most TLC-based drives suffer. Unfortunately, most other recent TLC-based drives have enough of an advantage in the empty-drive performance that their full-drive scores are still ahead of the M9Pe.

All of these SSDs have average latencies well below 1ms on the Light test, and even the SATA drive is more than fast enough. Some of the 99th percentile scores are high enough to potentially matter, but the 1.8ms from the M9Pe 512GB when the drive is full isn't quite that bad.

Average read latencies from the M9Pe are close enough to the fastest drives that the differences don't matter at all. Average write latencies are clearly worse for the M9Pe than for the top tier of drives, but even 100µs is insignificant for this kind of workload.

The 99th percentile read latency scores from the M9Pe stand out a bit for the full-drive test runs. The 99th percentile write latency scores show that the M9Pe avoids the problems that the Intel 760p and MyDigitalSSD SBX have with occasionally dropping down to SATA performance levels.

Energy usage is once more worse than average for the M9Pe, but several of the fastest drives also use more energy on the Light test than the M9Pe does.