Review on Plextor M8Pe 256GB PCIe NVMe Internal SSDDrive with Heatsink (PX-256M8PeY) by Sanny Hoffman

Excellent all round performance, comes with heatsink (most other NVMe devices don't). Doesn't pretend to be the fastest (MyDigitalSSD is faster but gets very hot and quickly drops to 1.4GB/s). Performance is in the top quarter of the scale and temperature is well controlled by the heatsink. I would place this device first, right behind Samsung's offerings. There is a throttling issue. With prolonged random reading, the temperature of the device drops to 76 ° C and the firmware slows down too much. The speed drops from 1.4 GB/s to 177 MB/s for 10 seconds, then back to 1.4 GB/s for 30 seconds and repeats. I am not giving them a star for this behavior for several reasons. First, they come with a heatsink, while most other M.2 devices don't have one. Second, it takes time to achieve this behavior. Third, they lower temperatures to 77C, which is good and conservative, meaning less chance of premature flash failure due to overheating, and other M.2 devices (Toshiba and MyDigitalSSD) throttle at much higher temperatures. The Plextor gives their customers a gift by setting the temperature at 77°C, I can't dock them for that although they could use an adjustment. No need to throttle to 177 MB/s for short packets :-). --------------512 62 MB/s (94 MB/s at 64 threads)1024 124 MB/s (135 MB/s at 64 threads)2048 248 MB/s (271 MB /s at 64 threads) 4096 494 MB/s (542 MB/s at 64 threads)8192 808 MB/s (899 MB/s at 64 threads)16384 1104 MB/s (1160 MB/s at 64 threads)32768 1282 MB/s (1281 MB/s @ 64 threads)65536 1391 MB/s (1385 MB/s @ 64 threads)131072 1662 MB/s (1664 MB/s @ 64 threads)262144 1667 MB/s (1660 MB/s ) @ 64 threads) Sequential read at 64 KB block size: 1131 MB/s Sequential read at 128 KB block size: 1211 MB/s ) * Stable random read results obtained. * Slow temperature change (good), no immediate throttling after stabilizing at 77°C during the read test (it takes some time to reach 77°C though). Note that Plextor was the only NVMe device to ship with a heatsink, so this is an expected result. However, it started to slow down when I ran the test significantly longer (see above). Although I don't see it as a showstopper. * Convenient chipset queue setting for M.2 devices (16/16 instead of 8/8 or 7/7). NVME version 1.2 maxqe=1024 caps=00300030280303ffnvme6: model PLEXTOR_PX-256M8PeG BaseSerial P02652102851 nscount=1nvme6: request 64/32 queues, return 16/16 queues, rw-sep map (16, 16) Interruptal1Comeal1Comeal1al disk nvme6:disk nvme3 ns=1 blksize=512 lbacnt=500118192 cap=238GB serno=P02652102851-1