Plextor PX-256M3 256GB SSD Review

Reading Benchmarks

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HD Tune

HD Tune – Sequential reading test

I present the graph below for comparison with other recently tested drives.

The Plextor PX-256M3 SSD’s performance was very impressive with an average reading speed of 444.8 MB/s and this makes it the fastest SSD with a Marvell controller.

ATTO disk benchmark

ATTO has become a standard tool for measuring the data throughput of HDDs and SSDs. It measures the reading and writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.

The first thing that we noticed is that ATTO can easily verify the numbers that Plextor gives on their website. As we can see the reading speed of the Plextor PX-256M3 SSD is very impressive, maximum read speed is close to 540MB/s and writing speed topping close to 380MB/s. As we can see the drive performs very well and it’s one of the fastest drives with a Marvell SSD processor that we have tested.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0

Crystal Disk Mark is quite a handy benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a problem on a system drive.

As we can see in the above screenshots, the Plextor PX-256M3 is performing almost identically for sequential read and write speeds, but it also has very good performance in the rest of the tests that Crystal Disk Mark  performs.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading and writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.

AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.

After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing overall.

Now let’s look at the result for the Plextor PX-256M3 SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’ results are presented in the form of a graph.

Not much to say about the Plextor PX-256M3, the drive simply dominates this test. 

Summary:

The Plextor PX-256M3 SSD has surprised us, not only because it performed extremely well in our basic synthetic benchmarks, but mainly because it was the first drive that was able to beat a SandForce drive. The only thing that we can say is that Plextor did a very good job with the selection of their components and their firmware.

We know that synthetic benchmarks don’t lie, but they only show what an SSD can do technically when it’s pushed very hard, and this can have very little relevance in a normal user’s desktop PC, which we will examine a little later in this article with real world tests.

Let’s head to the next page for our IOMeter test results…..

• Test PC and testing procedures
• IOMeter test results