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It's taken a while but with the M7V, Plextor finally have a TLC NAND equipped drive to enable them to join the battle in the entry-level end of the market.
With the combination of the Marvell 88SS1074B1 controller, Toshiba 15mn NAND and some tweaks in the firmware they are also trying to get an edge by offering better drive endurance than its competitors.
Although the drive is aimed more towards the entry-level end of the market it still has the suite of Plextor tools found with its more expensive MLC equipped siblings plus a few of its own to try to boost that endurance.
On the whole the M7V's performance is good, beating the previous MLC equipped M6V in all but one of our tests. The official sequential read/write figures of up to 560MB/s and 530MB/s respectively proved solid as when the drive was tested with the ATTO benchmark it produced a score of 564MB/s for reads and 535MB/s for writes which puts the drive in the top five 240/256GB 2.5in drives we have tested.
Its 4K random IOPS performance though painted a different picture as our drive failed to reach the official figures for both reads and writes. For reads it tested at 95,625 IOPS which is good but still some way off the official 98,000 IOPS but the writes at a disappointing 56,933 IOPS fell way, way short of the official up to 84,000 IOPS.
At the time of writing it's not the easiest drive to find, indeed we could only find one vendor offering it – Lambda Tek priced at £60.23 inc VAT HERE
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Pros
- Plextor's first TLC drive.
- Excellent sequential performance for its class.
- Strong 4K write performance.
- Plextor drive technologies.
Cons
- 4K read performance is a little weak.
- 4K IOPS writes performance is disappointing.
Kitguru says: Finally Plextor have a TLC drive in their range but it is pitched into a very competitive market segment with some very keenly priced competition.
