Plextor M5S 128GB review

Plextor has had some successes with its SSDs, with drives such as the M3 Pro providing impressive performance at a reasonable price.

Its latest drive, the M5S, relies on a tried-and-tested formula. The Marvell 88SS9174 controller was used in Plextor’s previous high-end drive, the M3 Pro, and we’ve also seen it in our favourite high-end SSD – the Corsair Performance Series Pro.

The high-end controller is partnered with 25nm synchronous MLC memory chips. This isn’t the fastest memory around; it may be the quicker synchronous memory type rather than the older and slower asynchronous kind, but there’s no sign of the high-speed Toggle Mode NAND that has brought such impressive speeds to mid-priced SSDs such as Corsair’s Force GS.

The controller may be quick, but we weren’t expecting the memory to set our benchmarks alight. In our large file write and read benchmarks the M5S returned scores of 237MB/s and 443MB/s. The read score is extremely impressive, outpacing the 416MB/s of the Best Buy-winning Corsair Force GS 240GB, but large file write speeds are significantly slower than the Force GS’s 321MB/s.

The Plextor drive couldn’t keep up in our small file tests. The Plextor M5S completed the small file write and read tests at 80MB/s and 87MB/s; the Force GS managed much faster scores of 146MB/s and 100MB/s.

The M5S also costs £1.01 per gigabyte for the 128GB version, which makes it significantly more expensive than quicker drives. The Plextor M5S’s middling benchmark figures and high price mean you’re far better off with the Corsair Force GS, which is £125 for the 180GB version.