The Plextor M6V (256GB) SSD Review

Random Read Performance

Our random read performance test is conducted on a full drive and tests queue depths from 1 to 32. We focus primarily on the lower queue depths that are typical of interactive use, but also look at how the performance and power scales to more intensive loads. For desktop use, searching and virus scanning are typically the biggest sources of random reads, and they can exercise some of the larger queue depths.

The M6V posts above average performance on the random read test, and is clearly better tuned for it than the Crucial BX100.

The power consumption and thus efficiency here are significantly better than the competition.

Default	Plextor M6V 256GBADATA XPG SX930 240GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial MX200 250GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung SM951 256GB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe)SanDisk Ultra II 240GB

The M6V scales well with increasing queue depths, and its high rating above comes mostly from its good performance with queue depths of 2 and 4. Power consumption starts low and only grows slightly.

Random Write Performance

The random write test is confined to a 16GB portion of the drive, which is otherwise empty. This allows the drive to demonstrate much higher performance than on our performance consistency test that fills the drive. Tasks like installing software updates can modify a lot of files, but aren't hitting the entire disk. Random writes to the entire disk are usually found only in enterprise workloads such as large databases.

The M6V falls back to being one of the slowest MLC drives, but the spread among 240-256GB drives isn't huge.

The lower performance again brings power savings, showing that the M6V is pretty well optimized, just not for peak performance.

Default	Plextor M6V 256GBADATA XPG SX930 240GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial MX200 250GBOCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung SM951 256GB (PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe)SanDisk Ultra II 240GB

Many drives of this size hit a performance limit somewhere along this test, but the M6V scales smoothly across the range of queue depths. However, the overall increase is small and the lower queue depths are left lacking.