Compared to the flashy, blue boxes that Plextor's 2.5-inch SSDs come in, the M5M's packaging is pretty boring. The drive ships in a simple clamshell similar to what memory modules come packed in. The sticker on top shows the model, capacity, firmware version and serial number of the drive inside. It's hard to make out in these pictures, but Plextor has also managed to squeeze in the drive's specs.
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Physical Features:
The M5M follows the JEDEC MO-300 standard for mSATA SSDs. It measures a mere 50.8 x 29.8 x 3.6 mm and is about one-eighth the size of a standard 2.5-inch drive. The M5M also has a 52-pin mSATA connector which supports data transfer rates up to 6 Gb/s.
Like the M5 Pro and M5Pro Xtreme, the M5M uses Marvell's new 88SS9187 "Monet" controller. The 88SS9187 is powered by a dual-core Marvell 88FR102 V5 CPU and supports up to eight NAND flash channels. The controller also features a high-performance ECC engine with adaptive read and write scheme as well as on-chip RAID functionality.
For the PX-256M5M, Plextor has opted to use Toshiba's 64GB 19nm TH58TEG9DDJBA89 Toggle Mode NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two of these chips on either side of the PCB. The drive also has a single Micron 512MB DDR3 memory chip that is used for caching and garbage collection.
