Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10909/the-plextor-m8pe-512gb-ssd-review
The Plextor M8Pe (512GB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on December 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTPlextor first entered the PCIe SSD market in 2014 with the M6e, based on Marvell's 88SS9183 controller supporting PCIe 2.0 x2 but not NVMe. In 2015 they followed it up with the M6e Black Edition that simply provided an adapter card and heatsink for an unchanged M.2 module. They also announced then delayed and eventually cancelled the M7e, which was to use the Marvell 88SS9283 to support PCIe 2.0 x4 connectivity. This year, the M8Pe finally brings a true high-end NVMe SSD to Plextor's product line.
The M8Pe series is available in three different variants, all based on the same M.2 module. The M8PeGN is the simple bare M.2 2280 card. The M8PeG adds a heatspreader that covers the top and sides of the M.2 module. This heatspreader should help alleviate the thermal throttling that all PCIe M.2 SSDs suffer from during sustained heavy benchmarking, but the added thickness will prevent it from fitting in some laptops. Finally, the M8PeY is a half-height half-length PCIe x4 add-in card adapter to house the M.2 SSD under a hefty slab of metal acting as a heatsink, and red LED accent lighting is included along the top edge of the card and under the Plextor Logo on the heatsink.
Plextor M8PeG with heatspreader
The Plextor M8Pe series shares its hardware platform with parent company Lite-On's CX2 client SSD for the OEM market. The controller is Marvell's 88SS1093 PCIe 3.0 NVMe controller codenamed "Eldora", with 8 NAND channels and support for NVMe 1.1 and LDPC error correction. The controller is a triple core design fabricated on a 28nm process. The 88SS1093 was one of the first PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD controllers available on the open market, and it was quickly adopted for entry-level enterprise PCIe SSDs by companies like Seagate and Micron. The Plextor M8Pe is the first consumer SSD to ship with this controller. As usual, Plextor/Lite-On wrote their own firmware for use with the Marvell controller instead of adopting a reference implementation.
The M8Pe uses Toshiba 15nm MLC NAND flash to provide drive capacities from 128GB to 1TB. Performance specifications are not as high as Samsung's latest generation of NVMe SSDs based on their Polaris controller, but are similar to the earlier Samsung 950 Pro and to Toshiba's OCZ RD400. The Plextor M8Pe has a five year warranty and endurance ratings that are only slightly below that of the Samsung 960 Pro.
Plextor M8Pe Series Specifications Comparison | |||||
128 GB | 256 GB | 512 GB | 1 TB | ||
Form Factor | M8PeY: Half height half length PCIe add-in card (HHHL) M8PeG: M.2 2280 with heatspreader M8PeGN: M.2 2280 without heatspreader |
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Controller | Marvell 88SS1093 | ||||
Interface | NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 | ||||
DRAM | 512MB LPDDR3 | 1024MB LPDDR3 | |||
NAND | Toshiba 15nm MLC | ||||
Sequential Read | 1600 MB/s | 2000 MB/s | 2300 MB/s | 2500 MB/s | |
Sequential Write | 500 MB/s | 900 MB/s | 1300 MB/s | 1400 MB/s | |
4KB Random Read (QD32) | 120k IOPS | 210k IOPS | 260k IOPS | 280k IOPS | |
4KB Random Write (QD32) | 130k IOPS | 230k IOPS | 250k IOPS | 240k IOPS | |
Endurance | 192 TBW | 384 TBW | 768 TBW | ||
Warranty | 5 years | ||||
Price (M.2 only) | $84.95 (66¢/GB) | $163.16 (64¢/GB) | $249.99 (49¢/GB) | $516.57 (51¢/GB) |
This review will primarily focus on comparing the Plextor M8Pe to other MLC-based PCIe SSDs, especially the similarly-priced Toshiba OCZ RD400 and Samsung 960 EVO. Our review sample is a 512GB M8PeY (add-in card with heatsink), so the drive has been tested both under the heatsink and as the M8PeGN in our usual plain M.2 adapter that offers no extra cooling.
Cooler drives tend to be a bit more power efficient, especially when they can avoid thermal throttling that would otherwise cripple their performance scores. However, the M8PeY's PCIe x4 to M.2 adapter wastes some power by drawing from the 12V supply and converting down to 3.3V, and spends even more on the flashing lights (about 0.5 W total). Thus, the M8PeY exhibits higher power consumption and worse efficiency on almost every test and only comes out ahead where thermal throttling most severely impairs the M8PeGN. The power efficiency comparisons in this review will focus on the M.2-only M8PeGN configuration that most laptop users would require.
Unlike Toshiba/OCZ, Samsung and Intel, Plextor has not provided a custom NVMe driver. The M8Pe has been tested with Microsoft's NVMe driver provided in Windows 8.1. As explained in our initial review of the Samsung 960 Pro, this driver has some peculiar behavior with regards to write caching performed by the SSD. The Windows default settings for NVMe drives are not comparable to the default settings for SATA SSDs or the default behavior of third-party NVMe drivers. This difference is most apparent when using benchmarking software that takes measures to ensure that it is testing the speed of the disk instead of the speed of the filesystem's cache in RAM, and the difference in behavior is seldom encountered by ordinary desktop applications. In order to provide a fair comparison against SATA SSDs and manufacturer-supplied NVMe drivers, our benchmarks of the M8Pe were run with write cache buffer flushing disabled. This is the setting that most closely approximates the behavior of other drivers.
AnandTech 2015 SSD Test System | |
CPU | Intel Core i7-4770K running at 3.5GHz (Turbo & EIST enabled, C-states disabled) |
Motherboard | ASUS Z97 Pro (BIOS 2701) |
Chipset | Intel Z97 |
Memory | Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 2x8GB (9-10-9-27 2T) |
Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 4600 |
Desktop Resolution | 1920 x 1200 |
OS | Windows 8.1 x64 |
- Thanks to Intel for the Core i7-4770K CPU
- Thanks to ASUS for the Z97 Deluxe motherboard
- Thanks to Corsair for the Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1866 DRAM kit, RM750 power supply, Carbide 200R case, and Hydro H60 CPU cooler
Performance Consistency
Our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.
In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.
To maximally stress the drive's controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.
The heatsink makes a huge difference in the sustained random write performance of the M8Pe. With the heatsink, the M8Pe is competitive with the Intel 750 and the Samsung 960 Pro and EVO. Without the heatsink, the M8Pe is slower by almost 10k IOPS, but still above average for consumer SSDs, including some of the NVMe competition.
The M8Pe's consistency scores are quite low, indicating that it lacks the tight regulation of Samsung and Intel's best drives that have similar average performance.
Default | |||||||||
25% Over-Provisioning |
The second by second performance plot reveals that the apparently low consistency is on the M8PeY due entirely to occasional outliers of extremely high performance; most of the time the M8PeY is operating at a very consistent ~22k IOPS, and none of the outliers fall below that level. The M8PeGN without a heatsink or heatspreader suffers from frequent periods of thermal throttling and slightly lower performance when not throttled. The lower performance also causes the M8PeGN to take slightly longer to reach steady state.
Default | |||||||||
25% Over-Provisioning |
With a heatsink, the M8Pe's steady state hovers around 22k IOPS, but without the heatsink it alternates between 18k IOPS and a thermally throttled 2400 IOPS. Fortunately, it spends more time in the high-performance state than the low performance state, and there are still a few of the extreme outliers above 100k IOPS.
The M8Pe responds very well to extra overprovisioning. The variability is increased slightly, but the performance with the heatsink jumps to 90-100k IOPS sustained. Without a heatsink, the steady state only increases to 60-65k IOPS, but the drive spends much less time thermally throttled and the performance in that state increases to about 6800 IOPS. It's no surprise that the Marvell 88SS1093 controller has been a popular choice for enterprise M.2 PCIe SSDs.
AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Plextor M8Pe isn't breaking any records on The Destroyer. Its average data rate is slower than Samsung's PCIe SSDs and the OCZ RD400, but it does beat the Intel SSD 750 and is about 75% faster overall than the fastest SATA SSDs. The heatsink on the M8PeY only provides a very slight performance boost.
The average service times of the M8Pe are on par with the OCZ RD400 and the Intel SSD 750, and substantially worse than Samsung's PCIe SSDs. The differences are minor in comparison to the huge latency advantage they all enjoy over the best SATA SSDs (and Intel's TLC-based SSD 600p).
The frequency of high-latency outliers places the M8Pe in the second tier of drives. Samsung's PCIe SSDs have few or no operations take more than 100ms and the smallest percentage of operations that exceed 10ms. The M8Pe scores similarly to the Intel SSD 750 and OCZ RD400.
The Intel SSD 600p is the only thing keeping the M8Pe from taking last place for power consumption among M.2 PCIe SSDs. The M8Pe uses significantly more power than the OCZ RD400, which itself is more power-hungry than Samsung's SSDs.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
On the Heavy test, the Plextor M8Pe can't compete with Samsung's MLC-based PCIe SSDs, but its average data rate is almost as high as the 1TB Samsung 960 EVO, and the 512GB OCZ RD400. The M8Pe is about 66% faster overall than the best SATA SSDs; a smaller margin than for The Destroyer but still substantial.
The average service time if the M8Pe is surprisingly slightly better when the test is run on a full drive than an empty drive. Either way, it doesn't deliver latencies as low as Samsung's PCIe SSDs, but it is close to the rest of the MLC-based PCIe SSDs.
The M8Pe has about twice as many high-latency outliers as the fastest PCIe SSDs, and the SATA-based Samsung 850 Pro is only a little worse off than the M8Pe.
The power consumption of the M8Pe is again worse than any PCIe M.2 drive other than the much slower Intel SSD 600p.
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.
On the Light test, the Plextor M8Pe is faster than Intel's PCIe SSDs but slower than OCZ and Samsung. The M8Pe is about 2.6 times faster overall than the best SATA SSDs when the test is run on an empty drive, and about 80% faster when the test is run on a full drive.
There's very little variation in average service times among the PCIe SSDs (except for the Intel SSD 600p). The Plextor M8Pe is essentially tied with the Intel SSD 750 and OCZ RD400, and only slightly behind Samsung's PCIe SSDs.
When the test is run on an empty drive, the M8Pe is as good as any drive at keeping the number of high-latency outliers low. The M8Pe is more strongly affected than Samsung's drives when the test is run on a full drive.
The Light test is easy enough that the Intel 600P doesn't get bogged down, so the M8Pe is the least power-efficient of the M.2 PCIe SSDs.
Random Read Performance
The random read test requests 4kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, which is filled before the test starts. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
The Plextor M8Pe's random read speed cannot match Samsung's 3D MLC-based 950 Pro or 960 Pro, but it is otherwise very good. The 30% lead over the OCZ RD400 is particularly notable given that it uses the same NAND as the M8Pe.
Power consumption is again higher than the rest of the M.2 PCIe SSDs, but given the good performance it does manage to be more efficient than the OCZ RD400.
It appears that there is a little bit of thermal throttling happening on the M8PeGN in the final phase of the test at QD32, but otherwise it scales well as queue depths increase. Samsung's SSDs mostly saturate at QD16 while the M8Pe continues to scale up, albeit with diminishing returns.
Random Write Performance
The random write test writes 4kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test is limited to a 16GB portion of the drive, and the drive is empty save for the 16GB test file. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
The random write performance of the Plextor M8Pe is better than the Samsung 950 Pro but falls behind more recent MLC-based PCIe SSDs, and Intel's SSD 750 is still the best.
The M8Pe's power consumption is only slightly worse than the OCZ RD400, but its efficiency is still substantially worse. The Samsung 950 Pro had even higher power consumption and delivered what is now unimpressive random write performance, so the M8Pe isn't the least efficient of the MLC-based SSDs.
Performance increases relatively slowly for the M8PeY in the second half of the test, and actually decreases for the M8PeGN, indicating thermal throttling as power consumption hits 4 W.
Sequential Read Performance
The sequential read test requests 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
The heatsink makes a big difference for sequential read speeds: the M8PeY is essentially tied with the Samsung 960 Pro and EVO (both of which have the advantage of higher capacity). Without the heatsink, the M8PeGN delivers average performance for MLC-based PCIe SSDs.
The M8PeY with its large heatsink (and LEDs) draws significantly more power than any of the M.2 PCIe SSDs to deliver top-notch performance. Without the heatsink (but with thermal throttling) the M8PeGN is still one of the most power-hungry drives. Neither configuration offers great efficiency.
The sequential read performance of the M8Pe saturates at QD4 when the heatsink is used, but without the heatsink it is thermally limited for almost all of the test.
Sequential Write Performance
The sequential write test writes 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
As with random writes and sequential reads, the heatsink makes a big difference for sustained sequential writes. Without the heatsink, the M8Pe's high power consumption leads to enough thermal throttling that it is the slowest MLC PCIe SSD in the bunch, but still substantially faster than SATA. With the heatsink, speeds are over 50% faster and the M8Pe is on par with the Intel SSD 750.
The power consumption situation is very similar to what we saw on the sequential read test. The thermally-limited M8PeGN draws a similar amount of power to the Samsung 960 Pro, while the M8PeY draws much more, and neither wins a prize for efficiency.
Without a heatsink, thermal throttling starts very early on this test, but the M8PeGN gets in enough of a burst at the beginning to have a noticeably better average at QD 1 than later in the test. With the heatsink, the M8PeY shows mostly flat performance across the entire duration of the test.
Mixed Random Read/Write Performance
The mixed random I/O benchmark starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. The queue depth is 3 for the entire test and each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. As with the pure random write test, this test is restricted to a 16GB span of the drive, which is empty save for the 16GB test file.
With a relatively low queue depth, this test is mostly about the access latency of the flash itself, and it's no surprise that the heatsink makes no difference to the M8Pe's performance. The M8Pe is slightly faster than the older Intel SSD 750 and Samsung 950 Pro, but is slower than the OCZ RD400 and Samsung 960 Pro.
Power consumption is again higher than the competition, giving the M8Pe in either configuration a poor efficiency score.
Performance increases relatively slowly as the proportion of writes increases; this is unsurprising given that we've already seen the M8Pe's strengths lie in its read speeds. The spike in performance in the final all-writes phase of the test is respectable and brings the average up to a typical score for this product segment.
Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The mixed sequential access test covers the entire span of the drive and uses a queue depth of one. It starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. Each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The drive is filled before the test starts.
The data rates on the mixed sequential I/O test are high enough that thermal throttling becomes a factor, and the presence of a heatsink improves the M8Pe's average by 11%. Performance in either configuration is a bit sub-par for an MLC-based PCIe SSD, but it's still at least twice as fast as any SATA SSD.
Power consumption is again the highest of any M.2 PCIe SSD, and efficiency isn't great.
There appears to be a little bit of thermal throttling during the first phase of this test, but most of it occurs at the end when the workload is all writes.
ATTO
ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.
The two configurations of the M8Pe ramp up identically as transfer size increases, but the M8PeGN without the heatsink starts throttling right after it hits full performance.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.
The M8Pe delivers short-duration sequential speeds that are second only to Samsung's PCIe SSDs, and tied with the much larger 1.2TB Intel SSD 750.
Idle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands.
There are two main ways that a NVMe SSD can save power when idle. The first is through suspending the PCIe link through the Active State Power Management (ASPM) mechanism, analogous to the SATA Link Power Management mechanism. Both define two power saving modes: an intermediate power saving mode with strict wake-up latency requirements (eg. 10µs for SATA "Partial" state) and a deeper state with looser wake-up requirements (eg. 10ms for SATA "Slumber" state). SATA Link Power Management is supported by almost all SSDs and host systems, though it is commonly off by default for desktops. PCIe ASPM support on the other hand is a minefield and it is common to encounter devices that do not implement it or implement it incorrectly. Forcing PCIe ASPM on for a system that defaults to disabling it may lead to the system locking up; this is the case for our current SSD testbed and thus we are unable to measure the effect of PCIe ASPM on SSD idle power.
The NVMe standard also defines a drive power management mechanism that is separate from PCIe link power management. The SSD can define up to 32 different power states and inform the host of the time taken to enter and exit these states. Some of these power states can be operational states where the drive continues to perform I/O with a restricted power budget, while others are non-operational idle states. The host system can either directly set these power states, or it can declare rules for which power states the drive may autonomously transition to after being idle for different lengths of time. NVMe power management including Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) fortunately does not depend on motherboard support the way PCIe ASPM does, so it should eventually reach the same widespread availability that SATA Link Power Management enjoys.
We report two idle power values for each drive: an active idle measurement taken with none of the above power management states engaged, and an idle power measurement with either SATA LPM Slumber state or the lowest-power NVMe non-operational power state, if supported.
Samsung is still the only PCIe SSD vendor that has made significant progress with idle power management. Even when put into the lowest power state, The M8Pe (and the Intel 600p and OCZ RD400) consume more power than most idle SATA drives with no power saving features engaged.
When NVMe power management is not supported or not enabled, the Plextor M8Pe doesn't look too bad by comparison, as even Samsung's PCIe drives idle at 1.2 W compared to the M8Pe's 1.5 W.
Final Words
The Plextor M8Pe cannot keep up with Samsung's 960 Pro, but otherwise it is a solid contender in the PCIe SSD space. Its overall performance is near the Samsung 960 EVO and the Toshiba OCZ RD400. All of them offer better real-world performance than Intel's SSD 750, showing that the PCIe SSD market has progressed and expanded greatly since that first consumer NVMe SSD. This level of performance now represents the middle range of the PCIe SSD market, where the Intel SSD 750 was a very exclusive top of the line product.
The M8Pe has once again shown that M.2 PCIe SSDs walk a fine line with with their power and temperature management. Comparing the M8Pe with and without its heatsink shows large performance differences on many of our long-running synthetic benchmarks, but minimal differences on our AnandTech Storage Bench tests that replicate real-world I/O patterns. Even though the M8Pe uses more power than most of its M.2 PCIe competitors, a heatsink is still not necessary for ordinary use. This is the same conclusion we came to with the Samsung 950 Pro and the Toshiba OCZ RD400. For users with unusually heavy storage workloads or with a concern for the aesthetics of their SSDs, Plextor offers two different cooling options: the M8PeY LED-lit add-in card with a substantial heatsink over the drive, or the similarly styled heatspreader on the M8PeG variant.
The performance differences between the Plextor M8Pe and the Toshiba OCZ RD400 are small enough that it will usually make sense to get whichever is cheaper at the moment. The RD400 does seem to have better write speeds while the M8Pe has better read speeds, but this adds up to only a slight advantage for the RD400 on our more realistic AnandTech Storage Bench tests. The RD400 also has lower power consumption than the M8Pe, which makes it less susceptible to thermal throttling during sustained loads.
The one big surprise from the Plextor M8Pe was its steady-state random write performance. With the heatsink it performed in the same league as the Intel SSD 750 and Samsung's 960 Pro and EVO. Even without the heatsink, it performed better than most consumer SSDs. Furthermore, when given the benefit of some extra spare area to work with, the M8Pe with a heatsink turned in the fastest steady-state random write speed we've measured on a consumer SSD. This shows that the Marvell 88SS1093 controller is quite capable of competing against Samsung's Polaris controller and even the enterprise-grade 18-channel monster from Intel. The Marvell controller can support 3D NAND, so we hope to soon see an even faster product using 3D MLC NAND. The steady-state performance of the M8Pe is also a credit to Plextor's custom firmware development, providing substantially higher performance and consistency than Toshiba delivered with the OCZ RD400 that uses the same NAND and a controller with comparable capabilities.
128GB | 250-256GB | 400-512GB | 1TB | 2TB | |
Samsung 960 EVO (MSRP) | $129.88 (52¢/GB) | $249.99 (50¢/GB) | $479.99 (48¢/GB) | ||
Samsung 960 Pro (MSRP) | $329.99 (64¢/GB) | $629.99 (62¢/GB) | $1299.99 (63¢/GB) | ||
Samsung 950 Pro | $196.90 (77¢/GB) | $339.99 (66¢/GB) | |||
Toshiba OCZ RD400A | $126.71 (99¢/GB) | $215.76 (84¢/GB) | $311.72 (61¢/GB) | $729.99 (71¢/GB) | |
Toshiba OCZ RD400 M.2 | Out of stock | $149.99 (59¢/GB) | $279.47 (55¢/GB) | $809.44 (79¢/GB) | |
Intel SSD 600p | $50.99 (40¢/GB) | $80.99 (32¢/GB) | $195.00 (38¢/GB) | $386.80 (38¢/GB) | |
Intel SSD 750 | $349.99 (87¢/GB) | $998.99 (83¢/GB) | |||
Plextor M8PeY (AIC w./ heatsink) |
$119.99 (94¢/GB) | $179.99 (70¢/GB) | $311.50 (61¢/GB) | Out of stock | |
Plextor M8PeG (M.2 w./heatspreader) |
$100.25 (78¢/GB) | Out of stock | $298.29 (58¢/GB) | $649.99 (63¢/GB) | |
Plextor M8PeGN (bare M.2) |
$84.95 (66¢/GB) | $163.16 (64¢/GB) | $249.99 (49¢/GB) | $516.57 (51¢/GB) |
At the moment, Samsung's 960 Pro and EVO are still only available as pre-orders, and several other PCIe SSDs have limited availability. This makes price comparisons tricky, but the general trend seems to be that the Plextor M8PeGN is slightly cheaper than the Toshiba OCZ RD400. This also puts it right around the MSRP for the Samsung 960 EVO. When it becomes available and assuming prices don't shift dramatically, the 960 EVO will be the clear pick out of those three models at the 1TB capacity point: Samsung's SLC caching implementation is top notch and the 1TB 960 EVO has plenty of room to handle typical write loads. At smaller capacities, RD400 and M8Pe will have the performance advantage, especially for heavier workloads.
The big question for most users will be whether any of these PCIe SSDs are worth the price premium they carry over SATA SSDs. As compared to the Samsung 850 Pro, the M8Pe is at least 66% faster on each of our AnandTech Storage Bench tests. With the 850 Pro pricing around 42¢/GB, the PCIe SSD offers quite a bit more performance for the money. The comparison against more mainstream SATA SSDs like the 850 EVO is not as easy. At about 33¢/GB, the 850 EVO is just over half the price and the M8Pe can't always deliver twice the performance. It's even less often that the performance of the M8Pe would feel twice as fast, since it's hard to improve on something that already feels instantaneous. Ultimately, the SSD market has broadened to the point that there's nothing close to a one size fits all recommendation, but for now the Plextor M8Pe is one of several reasonable high-end options.