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(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)
Similar to its predecessor, the Xtreme comes in the 7mm-thick, 2.5-inch standard design. The drive supports SATA 3 (6Gbps) and is backward-compatible with previous versions of SATA. The new drive also includes a 3.5-inch drive converter for you to use it with a desktop machine, the way you install a regular desktop hard drive.
And inside the compact package of the Xtreme, similar to the Pro, you'll also find an NTI SSD Utility Suite that includes drive cloning software and backup software. This helps you quickly update your existing computer from a hard drive (or an old SSD) to the new SSD. Unlike a few other SSDs, such as the Monster Digital, the M5 Pro doesn't include a USB-SATA adapter, so you'll have to get one by yourself in case you want to upgrade your laptop. For desktops, you can install the drive as a secondary drive for the cloning process.
And finally, again, similar to its predecessor, the Xtreme SSD also comes with a five-year warranty and offers the some 2.4 million hours of mean time between failure (MTBF), about double that of some other SSDs. This high MTBF means that the drive should have an exceptionally long lifespan.
Cost per gigabyte
During CES, Plextor Managing Director Darlo Perez told me that the M5 Pro Xtreme would be likely more expensive than other high-end SSDs on the market. For this reason, I was pleasantly surprised to find its current street pricing lower than $1 per gigabyte, which is the threshold for considering an SSD as affordable. The 256GB version, for example, is available for less than $250. In fact, you can even find the M5 Pro Xtreme for a price less than M5 Pro's at times. The drive seems to be in high demand, however, and its availability, as well as pricing change day by day. Nonetheless, with what it has to offer, the M5 Pro Xtreme is a great deal with less than $1 per gigabyte.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)
Performance
The M5 Pro Xtreme did very well in my testing and it was indeed slightly faster than the M5 Pro. I reviewed the 256GB version of the drive, and while it wasn't the fastest on all counts, it was easily one of the fastest SSDs on the market I've seen. (The drive was tested with version 1.02 of the firmware. Plextor released version 1.03, which promises to further improve the performance, at the time this review was published. Note that the new firmware works with the M5 Pro drive, too, though it won't turn it into the Pro Xtreme).
For sequential performance, I tested the Xtreme both as a secondary drive on a computer for it to show its top performance, and as the main drive that hosts the operating system on the computer. I test SSDs by copying some 50GB of data from one place to another. This test represents real-world experience and always yields a lower output than what vendors claim. This is because vendors tend to test SSDs using benchmark software that doesn't always represent how SSDs are used in the real world.
That said, the Xtreme was still very impressive. When used as a secondary drive, it registered about 270MBps for both writing and reading. When used as the main drive and writing and reading at the same time, it scored 168MBps. Overall it's about the second fastest drive on the market, just a tad slower than the OCZ Vector.
The drive improved the overall performance of the test computer a great deal. The test system took just about 11 seconds to boot up and and less than 5 seconds to shut down, much faster than when it used a standard hard drive as the main storage. Applications also loaded much more quickly. Compared with other SSDs, I could also see that it was slightly faster; for example, heavy applications such as games took a few seconds less to load. Unfortunately it's very hard to quantify the overall improvement in numbers. Still, the M5 Pro Xtreme was indeed one of the fastest SSDs I've seen.
Reference: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptop-hard-drives/plextor-m5-pro-xtreme/4505-9997_7-35567539.html
Contributors from: BS INFO TECH 2-B
Judywen Guapin
Jumari Tupan
Carlo Amora
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