The HHHL (Half-Height/Half-Length) version of the M9PY Plus comes packaged in an attractive black and rainbow colored box. The front advertises key features like the drive's 512GB capacity, support for NVMe, RGB LED lights and 5 year warranty. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding the M9PY Plus' features, specifications and box contents.
Inside the box, you'll find the M9PY Plus, 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 M9PY Plus is very well constructed. The top of the PCIe add-in card is covered entirely by a massive aluminum heatsink which has a nice black finish. The M9PY Plus also has a bright red bubble with the Plextor logo on it.
Along the top of the M9PY Plus 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. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to customize the lighting effects or turn the LEDs off.
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 M9PY Plus uses Marvell's 88SS1092 "Eldora Plus" controller. This 8 channel, PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe SSD controller is equipped with three ARM Cortex R5 cores and features support for 15/16nm MLC/TLC and 3D NAND. The 88SS1092 also integrates Marvell’s third generation low-density parity check (LDPC) technology for higher reliability and endurance.
For the 512GB version of the M9PY Plus, Plextor used Toshiba's 96-layer BiCS 4 3D NAND flash. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 256GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a single NANYA 512MB LPDDR3 DRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
