A Closer Look
Where many drives use stickers all over the front of the drive to display the brand and model, Plextor have always been more simplistic and to the point with the brand and model printed directly on to the brushed metal casing.
The rear of the drive on the other hand does feature a sticker, with tons of information packed in, including conformity logos, model number, capacity, serial number and firmware revision also available.
Inside the casing the 256GB M6S features all of its components on one side of the PCB, which is the same for all drives in the M6S series. Whereas SSDs traditionally use both sides of the PCB,which can be seen by the presence of SMT traces on the rear of the bard, the use of only a single side of the board here can cut down both the production costs and time – the end result hopefully being a lower cost to the consumer.
Made up of eight Toshiba THS8TEG8DDKTA20 20nm MLC packages, each with a capacity of 256Gb / 32GB, the M6S has a Marvell 88SS9188 at the heart of the operation with a SKhynix branded DDR3 package sat to the side giving 256MB RAM. We can see that there is space for a second DDR3 IC and this would be used on 512GB SKUs of this drive.
