With the development of SSD solid state drives, no one expected that in less than ten years, the speed of reading data could rapidly increase from the original speed of 100~150 MB/s of traditional hard disk HDD to the PCIe that can read more than 3000 MB/s all over the street. SSD, although this wave of competition in pursuit of access speed is slowly calming down, the next focus is that in addition to high speed, the storage device must also pay attention to the size of the capacity and the security and stability of the data. This is also the focus of Plextor’s upgrade to the M9Pe, which has been on sale for a long time.
Plextor M9P Plus is an upgraded version of Plextor M9Pe. The most important thing is the upgrade of hardware and transmission standard. The hardware upgrade includes the upgrade of the main control chip and the upgrade of flash memory particles. In addition to the improvement in the DRAM part, the upgrade of the main control also reduces the overall temperature due to lower power consumption. The upgrade of the flash memory allows even a 1TB capacity to achieve a single-sided PCB layout. In addition to allowing better heat dissipation, it also means that larger capacity specifications will have the opportunity to appear in the future, and the transmission standard has also been upgraded from NVMe 1.2 to NVMe. 1.3, which will increase the speed when multiple pieces of data are transmitted simultaneously.
Plextor M9P Plus SSD unboxing
Familiar appearance, the difference from M9Pe is the addition of the word Plus:
There is also a performance reference table on the back of the package, allowing players to choose the specifications they need:
Among them, the small package is M9P(GN) Plus with M.2 interface, which is the bare version of M9P Plus and is designed for use in laptops and desktops with built-in heat sinks:
From the outer shell, you can see that the M9P(G) Plus with a heat sink also uses the M.2 interface. From the appearance, you can find that the heat sink has been slightly upgraded. Compared with the heat sink of the previous generation, it is more solid. The larger heat dissipation area allows the M9P Plus to have better heat dissipation effect in long-term use and improves the service life:
The largest box is the M9P(Y) Plus that comes with a PCIe adapter card. It looks the same as the previous generation and also uses RGB LED colorful light strips:
The box comes with Low-Profile semi-high-end board accessories, which allow players to install them in chassis of different specifications, which is very convenient:
Opening the heat sink of M9P(Y) Plus, you can actually find three products with different numbers. The difference lies in heat dissipation. Of course, the one with the best heat dissipation is the M9P(Y) Plus with the largest heat dissipation area:
The hardware upgrade of M9P Plus is mainly divided into two parts. The first is the upgrade of the main control, which is upgraded from the original Marvell 88SS1093 (DRAM 2GB) to the commercial version of Marvell 88SS1092 (DRAM 8GB):
Another part of the hardware upgrade is to upgrade the flash memory particles from the original Toshiba BiCS 3 64 layers to the Kioxia BiCS 4 96 layers. Multi-layer stacking can make the particle space of the same capacity more streamlined, so the 1TB specification can also achieve a single-sided PCB layout. Because of this, it can have better performance in heat dissipation:
Performance measurement
Since the only difference between the three products is the heat dissipation and user interface, this test uses M9P(GN) Plus 512GB as the main test (test platform: ASUS ROG Strix GL12CX). It can be found from CrystalDiskInfo that in the transmission standard part, the original NVMe 1.2 has been upgraded to NVMe 1.3. The most important new features of NVMe 1.3 for players are Directives and Streams instructions and streaming. Simply put, it has better read-ahead and write amplification for multi-threaded work:
From the hard drive information, we can find that the actual capacity of the 512GB capacity is 476GB after conversion:
For the actual measurement part, we first used CrystalDiskMark to conduct the read and write test. The read speed was 3282 MB/s and the write speed was 2216MB/s. Compared with M9Pe, there was a slight improvement in both reading and writing:
Then the ATTO Disk Benchmark was used for the read and write test. The read speed was up to 3341 MB/s and the write speed was up to 2252 MB/s:
Then use TxBENCH to perform read and write tests. The read speed is 3218.4 MB/s and the write speed is 2189.7 MB/s:
Finally, AS SSD Benchmark was used for compression testing, and the read speed was up to 3061 MB/s, and the write speed was up to 2361 MB/s:
In addition to the read and write speed, we also used AIDA64 for a more complete write test. It can be found that after high-speed writing of about 25~30GB (2149.1 MB/s), it will start to slow down to 621.1 MB/s and continue writing:
Thermal comparison
The editor mentioned earlier that apart from the different interfaces, the biggest difference between the three models is heat dissipation. Therefore, this time the editor used the stability test of AIDA64 to simulate the operating temperatures of three different heat dissipations under normal use.
First up, the M9P(GN) Plus 512GB, which was mainly tested during this unboxing test, was tested for 30 minutes without any heat dissipation installed. The temperature was around 42 degrees Celsius:
Next is the M9P(G) Plus 512GB, which uses the same M.2 interface but has an additional heat sink. It can be found that after 30 minutes of testing, the temperature is around 39 degrees Celsius, which is about 3 degrees cooler than the case without a heat sink:
Finally, the M9P(Y) Plus 512GB uses the PCIe interface and has the largest heat dissipation area. After a longer one-hour test, it can be found that the temperature has been maintained at around 29 degrees Celsius. In addition to greatly reducing the operating temperature, it also has a safer use environment when high-intensity and long-term reading and writing are required:
Summarize
From the actual measurement results, it can be found that the upgrade of the NVMe transmission standard has led to a slight increase in read and write speeds. However, if it is for players who require 256GB, the improvement is even more obvious. The read and write speeds of M9P Plus 256GB have increased by nearly 60% compared with the previous generation. On the contrary, the read and write speeds of 512GB and 1TB have increased slightly by 14% for reading and 10% for writing.
As for the heat dissipation, it is mainly due to two parts. One is the upgrade of the main control, which reduces the power consumption and the relative SOC temperature. The second is the upgrade of the particles. Through the stacking of layers,Stacking makes the spatial layout of the particles more flexible, so the 1TB achieves a single-sided PCB layout to effectively control heat dissipation. In addition, Plextor’s temperature sensor and Dynamic Thermal Throttling firmware technology allow the SSD to always operate at a safe temperature, which greatly increases the stability of the SSD and data security. Together with the five-year warranty provided by Plextor, users can use it with more confidence. It is recommended to everyone.
Source: KOCPC Chinese