The HHHL (Half-Height/Half-Length) version of the M10P comes packaged in an attractive black and rainbow colored box. The front advertises key features like the drive's PCIe 4.0 interface, 2TB capacity, support for NVMe and 5 year warranty. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding the M10PY's features, specifications and box contents.
Inside the box, you'll find the M10PY, a low profile, half height bracket for use in servers and small form factor PCs, and a fold out guide containing warranty information as well as some brief installation instructions.
Physical Features:
Like Plextor's previous HHHL SSDs, the M10PY is very well constructed. The top of the PCIe add-in card is covered entirely by a massive aluminum heatsink which uses a series of fins as well as a graphene surface treatment to keep things cool. The M10PY also has a silver bubble with the Plextor logo on it.
Along the top of the M10PY there is a strip of RGB LEDs that light up red when the drive is powered on and will slowly cycle between various colors while it is in standby mode. During a read or write process, the color change speeds up to create a rainbow effect. According to Plextor, the RGB lighting is programmable and can be customized using software from many leading motherboard brands, including Asus Aura Sync, AsRock Polychrome Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion 2.0 and MSI Mystic Light Sync. I tried to synchronize the M10PY's lights with my MSI motherboard but, for whatever reason, the software did not recognize the drive.
If you want to void your warranty, the heatsink can be removed by taking out a few of the screws on the back of the card. With it removed, you can see the large thermal pad that Plextor has sandwiched inbetween the drive and heatsink.
With the heatsink out of the way, you can see the strip of LEDs along the top as well as the SSD itself. The drive is inserted into an M.2 slot and is held in place using a screw.
The M10PY uses Innogrit's Rainier (IG5236) controller. Designed for the high-end client and entry-level datacenter markets, this PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe 1.4 controller has 8 NAND channels that can run at up to 1200MT/s. The IG5236 also supports MLC, TLC and QLC NAND and features multiple data encryption and protection schemes including AES, ECC and end-to-end data protection.
For the 2TB version of the M10PY, Plextor has used Kioxia's 96-layer BiCS4 3D NAND flash. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 1TB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a pair of Micron 1GB DDR4 SDRAM memory chips that are used for caching.
