Plextor M7V 256GB review

   
The front of the box displays the drives capacity, warranty information and the logos for three of the Plextor drive technologies the M7V supports.  The rear of the box has a panel to display performance figures for the whole M7V range. It also carries a list of some of the drives specifications and the technologies it supports.

In an effort to keep the price as low as possible Plextor don't bundle anything in with the drive.

The M7V is built on a 7mm, 2.5in format with a metal case that is held together with four screws.

The PCB for the 256GB M7V is tiny, measuring just 40 x 52 mm. On one side are a pair of Toshiba second generation A19 15nm TLC Toggle NAND IC's (coded TH58TFG9UHLTA ) while on the other side of the board lurk two more Toshiba NAND IC's, the Marvell 88SS1074B1 8-channel controller and the 256MB Nanya DDR3L -1600 cache chip.

The Marvell 88SS1074B1 controller has been designed from the ground up to support TLC NAND and to help increase the endurance of TLC based drives includes Marvell's third generation NANDEdge error-correcting, LDPC (low-density parity check) technology.

In line with other manufacturers of TLC equipped drive, Plextor employ a write enhancing technology to boost write performance. PlexNitro has been designed especially with TLC NAND in mind and it performs a neat trick of not using any of the drives capacity. To quote Plextor “Utilizing so-called PlexNitro Cache as a buffer to improve the read and write speeds of TLC SSD, without taking away from user capacity as over provisioning.”

Plextor's Plextool suite of drive utilities may not be all bells and whistles like some but what's provided are basically all you need to look after the drive. With it you can look at the drive's status and its temperature, usage etc. There's a secure format facility, a page to perform firmware updates, a diagnostic scan and finally S.M.A.R.T info.

Although the M7V is a drive aimed at the value end of the market, Plextor haven't skimped on the technologies it supports; PlexTurbo, Plextor's SSD RAM caching technology, PlexCompresser, compression technology to automatically compress rarely used files and PlexVault, a secure storage area for sensitive files and documents are all here.

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