Plextor used to be a big player when it comes to optical drivers, DVD burners, Blu-ray readers and such. Over the last year or so the company has fallen back into the shadows of the competition and Plextor has been phasing over more and more to business solutions. Like so many other Plextor has given SSDs a try, with the PX-128M1S.
The perhaps most interesting bit about this drive is that it is not intended to be a performance freak. Plextor wanted to focus on reliability and life expectancy. The drive ships with a Marvell controller chip called 88SS8014-BHP2, a.k.a. “Da-Vinci”. Performance is rated at 130MB/sec read speed and 70MB/sec write speed.
This is quite a lot less than the top SSDs available today. On the other hand it ships with “Wear Leveling Technology” that makes sures the drive performs well no matter how scrappy and filled it becomes, reducing the need for TRIM. Exactly how the technology works wasn’t mentioned.
BBCHardware tested Plextor PX-128M1S and the benchmarks confirm the lower than average write speeds, even lower than the specified in some cases. This means that the drive can maintain about the same speeds as a mechanical drive at sequential writes. The drive is covered by 3 year warranty and even though we like seeing more of Plextor it will need more to stay in the game.
