Plextor has issued a press release announcing a firmware update for their M5 Pro series solid state disks. The firmware with version number 1.02 is called "Extreme" and Plextor adds that the upgrade turns your Plextor M5 Pro SSD into a Plextor M5 Pro Extreme drive. The biggest change is, according to Plextor, that the drive is now able to deliver 100,000 IOPS for random read speeds and 88,000 IOPS for random writes. When we announced the drive, back in August this year, Plextor specified a maximum of 94,000 IOPS for random reads and 86,000 for random writes.
The drive has a Marvell controller and uses Toshiba's 19 nm toggle NAND (we have Toshiba's own model using this NAND in our labs, teaser here) and according to Plextor these professional drives have a MTBF of 2.4 million hours (almost 275 years). Owners of a Plextor M5 Pro will have to wait a bit before they can turn their drive into an Extreme model, the release of the firmware is expected to be in a week.
