The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single misstep

We’re not mad. We’re just disappointed. When Plextor announced in February that it, too, was entering the SSD market, we were cautiously optimistic. After all, more competition is always a good thing and Plextor wouldn’t put out a subpar product just to try to capitalize on a trend—would it?

The Plextor PX-128M1S is the first drive we’ve tested that is built on the Marvell 88SS8014-BHP2 “Da Vinci” controller—and if its performance is indicative of the platform as a whole, we hope it’s the last.

Although read speeds were respectable for a last-gen drive at 135MB/s average sustained reads, average sustained writes were a sub-mediocre 50MB/s. And though the controller has its own garbage-collection and wear-leveling algorithms, it doesn’t support the TRIM command.

We like that the Plextor drive ships with a copy of Acronis True Image to facilitate upgrades, but that hardly makes it unique and the drive just can’t compete with modern SSDs.

Given that the 128GB PX-128M1S doesn’t offer top-tier performance, we were surprised by Plextor’s decision to charge $400 for it. The price dropped to $335 within a few weeks which makes it slightly more reasonable, but not enough so. You can get the 128GB Torqx for just $30 more and get much better performance and TRIM support to boot.

See comparative benchmarks on the SSD landing page.

<< Back to the SSD Roundup Page          On to the Next Review >>

• WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB

• OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise 100GB

• OCZ Vertex LE 100GB
  

• Corsair Nova V128 128GB