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The Plextor M6 Pro drive arrives in a gorgeous rose gold coloured box. Top marks for presentation.
The back of the box contains information on the products, including the rated official speeds.
The outer sleeve is easily removed to expose the inner box, which is black.
The Plextor M6 Pro drive is shipped sandwiched in thick, heavy duty foam – we can see very little chance this drive could get damaged in transit, even with the most careless of handling.
The bundle is excellent. Plextor include the a software disc, which contains various software packages. There is also a quick installation guide, 3.5 inch bracket and SATA cable.
The Plextor M6 Pro is certainly a looker – the brushed aluminum is coloured rose gold. The ‘Plextor' name is screen printed. They really have spared no expense with this chassis. It would look great on show inside a system with a windowed panel and lighting.
Opening the chassis will invalidate your warranty, so don't do it – that is why we are here! Plextor have completely coated the chassis in the rose gold finish, even the insides, which you never will look at ! A little thermal pad is positioned for the controller – meaning it will use the chassis as a cooling heatsink. One side of the chassis is covered in a lining to protect the PCB from connecting against the metal.
By this stage I didn't know whether to test the drive, or eat it. The presentation really is that good.
The M6 Pro is powered by the Marvell 88SS9187 controller – which has always scored well in our tests. Plextor claim to have customised the firmware in house, so it will be interesting to see how it performs later in the review.
It is an 8 channel, dual core server level controller with full support for DDR3 cache memory. Toshiba A19nm MLC flash NAND is fitted onto the PCB – which was used in the Radeon R7 SSD which we reviewed a short while ago. An SK Hynix 512MB DDR3 cache is used in the 256GB drive.
Reliability of the drive should be high, and Plextor are standing by the unit by offering a full 5 year warranty. They rate the drive with a mean time between failures (MTBF) at 2.4 million hours – one of the highest we have seen.
