The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, Plextor SU800 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Plextor's M8Se SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Patriot Hellfire, Plextor M8Pe, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Samsung SSD 850 EVO and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the M8Se is based on Marvell's 88SS1093 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Plextor M8Se 512GB |
 Plextor M8Pe 512GB |
According to Plextor, the 512GB version of the M8Se is capable of reading at 2,450 MB/s and writing at 1,000 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the M8Se's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Plextor M8Se 512GB
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the M8Se had average read and write speeds of 1387.7 MB/s and 434.4 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 483.0 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the M8Se uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 720 MB/s and then drops to about 400 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache. The cache on the 512GB version of the S2C is also surprisingly small. It appears to use about 1% of the drive's total capacity, which is about 5GB.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the M8Se's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Plextor M8Se 512GB |
 Plextor M8Pe 512GB |
When tested with ATTO, the M8Se's read speeds topped out at about 2,481 MB/s and its write speeds at 1,005 MB/s.
