Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive

Whitepaper

Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

contents
P.01
1. Introduction of Plextor M5 Pro 2. Exterior

P.02 P.03 P.05

3. Specification 4. Extra Reliability Tests 5. Enterprise-class Components 6. TrueProtect - Data Protection with Dual-strength

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7. 256-bit Data Encryption Technology Supported 8. Performance Remains Unchanged 9. After-sales Service 10. About the Plextor Solid-State Drive

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

Introduction of Plextor M5 Pro

M5 Pro is a solid-state drive for business uses developed by Plextor, featuring minimum use of materials, rigorous quality control, and full product testing that offer the ultimate safety and reliability under optimal performance for business servers, workstations, notebook PCs, and higher-level PC applications. It not only improves the bottleneck caused during conventional data reading and writing in computer systems, but also opens up a whole new perception for the endurance of usual solid-state drives. M5 Pro is currently the most reliable solution for 2.5-inch solid-state drives.

Exterior

Plextor M5 Pro is a data storage product designed under the specification of 2.5-inch for most hard drives, featuring Serial ATA 6.0 Gb/s (SATA III) data transfer interface. With a dimension of 69.85 x 1000 x 7 mm, it could be widely used on major desktop PCs, notebook PCs, servers, and other data storage devices.

69.85m

7mm

100mm

* Note 1: The height of this drive is 7 mm, suitable for notebook PCs designed with the height of 9.8 mm.

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

3
Model Capacity DRAM Cache Interface Temperature Weight MTBF

Specification
PX-128M5P 128GB 256MB DDR3 Up to 540MB/s Up to 330MB/s 92K Read 82K Write PX-256M5P 256GB 512MB DDR3 Up to 540MB/s Up to 460MB/s 100K Read 86K Write PX-512M5P 512GB 768MB DDR3 Up to 540MB/s Up to 470MB/s 100K Read 88K Write

Seqential Read Speed Seqential Write Speed Random Read/Write Speed (IOPS 4KB)

SATA 6.0 Gb/s (SATA III), compatible with SAS 6.0 Gb/s interface 0C ~ 70C (Operating) 70 g 2.4M hours S.M.A.R.T Fully supports S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) that checks status of the solid-state drive at any time. Global Wear Leveling: Maximizes life of the solid-state drive with the write-in sector for data scattered in flash memory units. Garbage Collection: During the system stand-by, the controller of the solid-state drive automatically erases some unneeded sectors to maintain the write-in speed for the solid-state drive. Instant Restore technology A special feature of Marvell chips that complements other applied technology to maintain performance of the solid-state drive. TRIM - Supports the command sent from the operating system to clean dirty data. Bad Block Manage Algorithm This application replaces the damaged data sector in the solid-state drive with other backup sectors. NCQ Performance of the Plextor random reading/writing can be enhanced by native command queuing.

Sustaining Performance Technology Supported

Operating System Supported Warranty

Microsoft Windows series, Mac OS, Linux 5 years Plextor's Warranty Service

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

Extra Reliability Tests

An enterprise storage device is usually responsible for acting as an important systems contact window for internal and external communications that supports software and information management efforts of many departments. Plextor M5 Pro specifically offers the most reliable solution of systems storage for those systems that are not tolerant on crashes, damages, and service interrupts. To comply with the standards for Microsoft Windows Device Testing Framework, the following pre-production test items have been specially added to the already-complex testing procedures for this Plextor M5 Pro drive, so that through more rigorous reliability tests, the ideal stability for your system could be ensured. Even in the event of abnormal system reboot, important data could also be protected as much as possible.

Sustained Read and Write Test

48 Hours

48 hours of reading and writing tests ensure that the system will not crash, delay, or get in blue screen because of problems with the solid-state drive.

No crash or blue screen

Sleep and Hibernation Test

4000 times

4000 times of system sleep/hibernation and wake-up tests ensure that the system hibernation and reboot will function properly for a power-saving and fast and stable computer.

No crash or blue screen

Cold and Warm Boot Tests

250 times

Proper functioning after 250 times of cold and hot booting tests has shown that the M5 Pro is able to withstand software problems and accidents.

No crash or blue screen

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

1_ Sustained Read and Write Test

To ensure that no blue screen or crash would occur during normal high-speed data reading and writing, the hours-long sustained reading and writing test has been added into the series of tests for the M5 Pro drive to further proof its quality. During the test, the I/O meter will continuously conduct the reading and writing test for 48 hours with the data block set as 4 KB and the read-write ratio each set as 50%. No error in data reading and writing will be allowed during the test so that the M5 Pro drive's performance can be proven under pressure from long hours of tests.

2 _ Sleep and Hibernation Test

Hibernation is an important function for modern desktop PCs and notebook PCs to save power and has also been a major topic in preservation of environment. To ensure that the system could be properly awakened by users from each instance of hibernated state, Plextor has conducted repeated S3 and S4 hibernation and wake-up tests for as many as 4000 times for the M5 Pro drives in addition to other tests. After 24 hours of sustained reading and writing, the system is allowed to enter into sleep (S3, 30 minutes) and hibernated (S4, 5 minutes) modes, and will then be awaken. It will have to be successfully awakened and function properly every time from the 4000 times of wake-ups during the test, to be considered having passed the test.

3 _ Cold and Warm Boot Tests

Unexpected events could take place at any time. We have all experienced issues of non-proper functioning of software. Every time when the system restarts with non-proper procedures, the data protection feature for the solid-state drive will be challenged. Every batch of the M5 Pro drive will have to go through 250 times of cold and warm boot-ups to simulate users' ability to protect data in the drive unaffected by software and other hardware issues, so that risks of data loss caused by cold and warm boot-ups could be reduced.
* Note 2: Warm Boot-up - Reboot the system with a key combination of Control + Alt + Del when there is no response from some software in the system. * Note 3: Cold Boot-up Reboot the system directly with the system power or the reset button. * Testing Environment: Intel 3 Gen Core-i7, i5, i3 Processor, Intel Z77 Express chipset motherboard, DDR3-1600 memory, Windows 7 64-bit.

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

Enterprise-class Components

In addition to its advanced data processing computing technology, the solidstate drive from Plextor also adopts enterprise-class components for important parts to ensure that the Plextor M5 Pro could offer a high-performance and high-reliability user experience in a sustained period of time under every type of tough environment of application. Complemented by the newest Marvell 88SS9187 server-grade solid-state drive controller, the M5 Pro drive enjoys unparalleled performance, thanks to the Toshiba 19 nm flash memory that employs the toggle mode. With the built-in dual-core Marvell 88FR102 V5 processor, it will be able to effectively process Instant Restore, TRIM, Global Wear Leveling, and other application of computing, in maintaining the supposed performance of the solid-state drive.

TrueProtect - Data Protection with Dual-strength

The Plextor M5 Pro series solid-state drive is equipped with the dual-stage data debugging feature TrueProtect that is not possessed by regular solid-state drives. It offers superb accuracy for data stored in this drive and helps maintain the excellent performance. The first stage of this feature is to let every piece of your data receive protections of ECC data testing by the built-in Marvell 88SS9187 high-performance ECC debug algorithm engine. Through BCH code computing, data error as high as 128 bits could be fixed during every instance of data transmission. Usage rate for the processing unit of the controller during the ECC computing could also be lowered so that performance will not be reduced because of the debug operation. Should the ECC engine fails to restore correct information, the firmware of Plextor M5 Pro will automatically launch the Robust Data Hold-out algorithm exclusively developed by Plextor, so that the feature of self-detection could be activated directly from the layer of flash memory to ensure accuracy of data in the solid-state drive to be 60% higher than other solid-state drives currently available. Conceptual chart for the ECC algorithm employed by flash memory units is shown below:

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

256-bit Data Encryption Technology Supported

Through software control, Plextor M5 Pro can perform encryption based on the 256-bit Advance Encryption Standard (AES) for data stored, in an effort to enhance security for important data. Because of its special calculation method and high level of difficulty for code breaking, this data encryption technology introduced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been widely adopted in government, research, and other environment where high level of data security is demanded. The calculation for data encryption by the Plextor M5 Pro is almost conducted directly by its controller. Even under slightly slower speed of data transfer resulted from the encryption, the M5 Pro series will still offer the strong performance unparalleled by other conventional hard drives under this mode of encryption.

Performance Remains Unchanged

The superb performance characteristic of the Plextor solid-state drive is highlighted by the mode of reading under Uncompressed Bitmap Format. Under this mode, complemented by the powerful Global Wear Leveling and Instant Restore technologies, the performance of the drive will not drop because of having a big volume of data written in after a period of time. You can still experience the performance like the first day you used the system.

1 _ PCMark 7
This testing software will simulate user usage through starting system, application, Windows Defender, gaming, and other testing items (totaled 7) for the solid-state drive. Test scores will be provided to reflect users' evaluation on its performance. As shown in the comparison chart below, you can see that the performance of M5 Pro is not significantly affected after a period of time.

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

PCMark 7 HDD testing score

Higher is better

Score

5495

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

Secondary storage score

2 _ AS SSD
This test software is available to users free of charge and enables users to witness the superb post- NCQ-calculation enhancement in performance of the Plextor M5 Pro drive in random reading and writing. The drive features powerful sequential reading and writing for a speed able to match demands from every type of software application.

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

3 _ CrystalDiskMark
The test software CrystalDiskMark has always been loved by professional users. Every M5 Pro user can enjoy actual performance according to its specifications while the performance for writing will not be affected because of not being able to compress data, offering you the most practical user experience. Testing Environment: Intel Core-i5 3450K, ASRock Z77 Extreme 4, DDR31600 4GB x 2, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, Dirty mode: 12 hours of random data reading and writing

After-sales Service

Under premise of proper usage and installation of the M5 Pro series, Plextor provides limited warranty for five years since the date of its purchase, and repairs (both software and hardware) and replaces the product bought by the original purchaser based on the condition of this product. Upon requesting warranty services, please provide your contact information, manufacturing date for the product, model number, serial number, as well as the descriptions of the problems.

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Plextor M5 Pro Solid-State Drive Whitepaper

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About the Plextor Solid-State Drive

Since launching the first M2S solid-state drive at the end of 2010, Plextor has positioned itself as a provider of the high-end solid-state drive. The M3 Pro series introduced in March of 2012 drove the market trend for mobile computing platform to be thinner with its 7-mm thinness offering the most powerful storage device for ultra-thin laptop and UltraBook. It won positive feedbacks in the industry and was a well-reputed manufacturer of solid-state drives that offer overall excellent performance.