Plextor M7V 2.5-Inch SATA3 512GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Plextor M7V can be a bit tricky to get hold of in Europe. I did find one Polish shop that had it in stock for €135.94, so we can expect a UK prize around £105 to £120. US readers have it easier and can pick up their new M7V for $129.99 at NewEgg. The smaller 128GB model is already widely available everywhere.

Conclusion

The 2.5-inch form factor is still the go-to type for most people and Plextor’s M7V drive is without a doubt a strong competitor within this area. We once again see that TLC-based drives aren’t something that you should fear. The NAND products have come a long way and so have the controllers, bringing them very close to their MLC-based brothers.

The M7V drive did very well in our performance benchmarks and we saw figures up to 560MB/s reading and 530MB/s writing. Random performance was equally nice with 90K IOPS at read operations and 80K at write operations. That on its own isn’t bad at all, but it isn’t what puts the icing on the cake here.

Plextor chose to make their PlexTurbo software available for all their drive and that includes the M7V. The tool is simple in itself as it’s basically an RAM-Disk cache, but it does bring both significant performance boosts as well as an increased lifespan of your drive. It’s hard to argue with either and as most people never fully utilize their memory anyway, why not use a little of it for something useful and speed up the entire system.

With the added bonus of PlexTurbo as well as the other software parts such as PlexCompressor and PlexVault, the Plextor M7V 512GB 2.5-inch drive goes beyond what we normally see from a budget drive.

Pros

• Great performance
• PlexTurbo RAM disk support for better performance and increased lifespan
• PlexVault for secure drive spaces and PlexCompressor for increased capacity
• Advanced LDPC error correction technology
• Full NAND capacity
• Cheap price

Cons

• EU availability

“Plextor’s M7V sets itself apart from other value-oriented drives with its software bonus that helps you protect your files, improves the performance, and increases the available capacity of the already good drive.”

Thank You, Plextor for providing us with this sample.