Plextor PX-M2 Series PX-256M2S 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: As an IT professional I've made countless single upgrades to my own systems for years. Switching from disk to SSD was the best single upgrade I've ever made.

Cons: Does not come with case mounting adapters to any desktop ATX standard.

Pros: It's easy to overlook Plextor - and their SDD's previously branded by their parent company LiteOn. But these guys have traditionally been associated with top-notch quality in optical drives. Their SDD's appear to be no exception.

Marvel controller is proven fast and reliable - same controller as the Intel 510, with firmware tweaks. Toshiba 34 nm toggle NAND - again fast, long lasting.

Aluminum case is very light (both solid and attractive. It covers a 1.8" form factor PCB. Perfect for a laptop, with added options if you're willing to crack the case.

Plextor's firmware is more balanced in read/write performance than either Intel or Crucial. Depending on how you use the drive, that could be a pro. I'll be using it in a general purpose production workstation - Visual Studio & Adobe products. I expect rock solid reliability, and many years of worry-free performance.

Cons: Not the ultimate speed king (but more reliable). 4k random reads are not particularly impressive - typical for this controller.

Other Thoughts: I'm currently using this on an overclocked i5 750 platform - Gigabyte P55 UD4, SATA 2 only. Because of that, sequencial reads saturate the bus, so I can't testify to max values. But it hits all other advertised specs, and matches various online reviews.

Pros: Lightning Fast. Great price for an SSD of this size. Comes with Acronis True Image (OEM) Home for transferring/cloning your old drive.

Cons: Doesn't come with a SATA cable, but that's not a big issue. Just something to be aware of for those that may not realize it. If you don't have an extra SATA cable, make sure you buy one.

Other Thoughts: Bought this as my first SSD drive and I'm amazed. I've known about the performance increases from going to a SSD drive, but actually seeing it for myself almost floored me. Windows 7 went from nearly 60 seconds until fully loaded on my previous drive to under 10 seconds. Literally from the time I hit enter after typing in my password it takes 5-7 seconds for the desktop and all my startup programs to be fully loaded into memory.
If you're thinking about buying an SSD drive, do it. If you're thinking about buying this Plextor drive, do it. Lightning quick, great amount of space for a primary disk, and a better price than most this size.

One thing to beware of, however: if you're upgrading from a Hard Drive (magnetic disk), it's almost always a better idea to install a fresh version of Windows to a SSD drive. You'll get much better performance out of doing so. So if you're planning on cloning the drive, take that into account first. It might just be worth it to do a fresh install.

Pros: Works great!

Cons: None. They are all expensive

Pros: More reliable then competition, Sata III

Cons: Had some acronis issues, but oh well.

Other Thoughts: If you wanna make the step up to SSD and have some space, This is your best shot at the price as of 2011.

Pros: I installed this drive into my MacBook Pro 2011.
Cheap compared to other drives of the same size.
SATA III
256GB Space on an SSD

Cons: Underwhelming performance.
Call Tech Support and they want me to download a benchmark program which cost me $39.99. Still waiting on tech support to get back with me.

Other Thoughts: Ran Benchmark on MacBook Pro before and after installing drive and my numbers got worse. I use to have a 60 GB SATA II SSD drive in my MacBook Pro and I got Read/Writes around 250mb/sec.
Now with this drive I get 309 Reads and 150 Writes. It's the writes that really bother me. Here are the average of the results of the benchmark tool the tech support wanted me to use.
Transfer Size Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
32K 145 179
64K 174 256
128K 182 268
256K 209 311
512K 200 390
1MB 127 300
2MB 123 309
4MB 121 319
8MB 124 331
16MB 128 336
32MB 127 338
64MB 128 338
128MB 127 333
256MB 130 339

Pros: Cheap 256GB SSD Drive
SATA III
It is a SSD

Cons: Does not get anywhere close to the stated Read/Write Speeds

Other Thoughts: I bought this drive because of the price. I benchmarked my 2011 MacBook Pro before and after installing this drive and it actually made my numbers worse. What really bothers me is the write speed. Called Tech support. They wanted me to test the drive with another program that required me to pay $39.99 to get and I'm now waiting on their response. Here are the results. Nowhere near the 420/330 stated.

Transfer Size Write MB/sec Read MB/sec
32K 145 179
64K 174 256
128K 182 268
256K 209 311
512K 200 390
1MB 127 300
2MB 123 309
4MB 121 319
8MB 124 331
16MB 128 336
32MB 127 338
64MB 128 338
128MB 127 333
256MB 130

Pros: Very fast drive. The first SSD I've used in a computer for myself. I use this in a corporate environment. The slowest part of my old computer was Outlook and searching Outlook. With this SSD, Outlook flies. I can sort by FROM and it responds instantly. I do video editing and accounting and a whole lot more and it makes all the difference. I'll never use rotary storage for my OS and software again.

I've upgraded most of my users' computers with a Kingston V100+ 128GB drive and it is also very good. This drive, being SATA III and just plain rated faster is a noticeable difference between those two drives. I'm impressed.

Cons: After being up and running for 3 months, all of a sudden, Windows 7 froze and the hard drive activity LED was stuck on. I could get the computer to run normally for 20-60 minutes before it would do the same thing again. On reboot, the motherboard got stuck in a POST reboot loop. I blamed the motherboard for the freeze b/c the POST reboot loop happened with my HD removed. It had to be the mobo. I arranged for a new mobo and while I was waiting, I checked for updated firmware of my Plextor SSD. Plextor's website sucks. They don't give you previous version changelogs and it's hard to find and navigate. Anyway, I upgraded from 1.01 to 1.03 (on July 21, 2011) and got back to Windows. The problem was solved.

If you get this drive, be sure to update the firmware to 1.03 (or newer) to prevent this activity. I'm not sure exactly what caused it (TRIM, maybe...it was mentioned in 1.03), but upgrading the firmware saved me. Didn't lose any data, either.

Other Thoughts: Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7-B3
Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 4x4GB
HIS Radeon HD6870
Intel Core i7-2600K
Corsair HX750W PSU
Plextor PX-M2 256GB SATAIII
2x Seagate Barracuda St320005N1A1AS-RK 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s

Pros: Very fast (see below for disclaimer ;)

Cons: Moderate power consumption when compared to competitors.

Other Thoughts: Using this with Ubuntu 11.04, btrfs with zlib compression and SSD optimization on an AMD Athlon Neo II MV-40 powered netbook. It boots in 8 seconds, and is wicked fast at everything it does. Sustained transfers at 174MB/s--after that the whole PC locks up and nothing but disk I/O takes place. Moving data internally (i.e. from one snapshot to another), I'm seeing averages of 2.2GB/s. Booting in to Windows sees the performance of this disk fall flat on the floor by comparison--not nearly as fast as it should be. Typical writes in Windows 7 are around 30-40 MB/s. Typical reads in Windows 7 are between 50 and 65 MB/s.

Pros: Very fast sequential transfers. Not as fast as stated in specs but respectable. Mid to high 300's read, Mid 200's write.

Cons: Slower than expected 4K transfers. I have been seeing speeds around 20-30 read and 30-40 write. For 4K-64Thrd transfers I should see the read speeds go up something like 8-10x with AHCI enabled but I only see them go up to the mid 60's.

Scores about 300 in AS SSD Benchmark. Not competitive for this class of drive.

Other Thoughts: I am disappointed in the overall performance of the drive. While the sustained transfer is good, most drive operations consist of small random concurrent operations.

I have done everything I can to optimize system and verify that I am using the latest drivers with AHCI enabled.

I hope that in the future there is a firmware update that will improve the performance of this drive. I have not, however, been able to find any reference to firmware updates, firmware updating utilities, or any other drive utilities on the Plextor site.