Plextool Software
The bundled Plextool software is a great companion for this drive, giving you all the information and tools you’ll need in one centralized place. On the first page, when we launch the application, we see some general information about our drive. You’ll of course need to select it in the top if it isn’t the first drive on your list.
Total capacity, free- and used- space, bus speed, temperature and trim information is presented to quickly see everything. A health barometer is placed there as well, to give a clear and instant indication of the drives state.
We’ll just skip the second panel as it’s just some information about the tool itself. The third panel allows you to secure format your drive. This will not only get rid off all data, but also help when the drive is dirty and to get some extra performance back. But this is a ‘years from now’ option for this drive.
On of the most used functions will probably be the one presented on the fourth page, updating the firmware of the drive. This is all very easy and straight forward.
The tool also has a small diagnostics tool build in. It will take a quick performance test and show you the figures as well as a rating if passed or not.
The SMART informations can be found on the second last panel of the tool. It will give you all the raw data from your drives health state, power on cycles and so forth. A page very interesting at times, but not one needed so often by the average user.
The last panel we get to is the really interesting one, at least it was to me. This is where we can enable the PlexTurbo mode. By using an intelligent prediction method and placing relevant data in the RAM, it can speed up the data transfer to rates not otherwise possible on the SATA3 bus. The performance will of course depend on each individual system and it’s components, but anyone can gain benefits from it.
The caching method also helps to increase the lifespan of your drive by reducing the amount of write cycles needed.
