Plextor bumps SSD speed with M3 Pro line
The company's flash-memory drives are faster and now sized to fit within very thin notebooks, the company says at CES.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Relatively expensive flash memory keeps the cost of SSDs much higher than I'd prefer, but competition keeps everyone honest, so I'm glad to see Plextor announce its M3 Pro line of solid-state drives.
These 2.5-inch models, with a slim 7mm height suitable for thin notebooks, will ship in February in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB, the Japanese component maker said at CES this week. It didn't disclose pricing.
The new models step up from the existing MS3 products in data-transfer speed, the prime reason most folks pay the price premium and sacrifice the capacity compared to conventional hard drives. The M3 Pro has sequential read and write speeds of "up to" 540MBps and 450MBps respectively, and random read and write speeds of up to 75,000 and 69,000 input-output operations per second, Plextor said.
They use a Marvell controller, employ a 6Gbps SATA interface, and Toshiba's flash memory. They come with a mounting bracket to fit into larger 3.5-inch drive slots.
