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The PX-256M5P comes in a shiny, blue and black box. Along with a picture of the drive, the front advertises many of its key features including its 256GB capacity, SATA 6Gbps interface, True Speed technology and 5 year warranty. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding its features, specifications and box contents. Inside, you'll find the SSD, a 3.5" adapter bracket, mounting screws, quick installation guide, warranty card and a CD containing NTI's SSD Utility Suite.
Physical Features:
Like Plextor's previous SSDs, the M5 Pro is very well constructed. The drive's outer casing is made entirely out of metal. Along with it being strong and durable, it is very lightweight. On top of that, its brushed aluminum finish looks great.
Plextor has reduced the M5 Pro's height from the standard 9.5mm down to 7mm. While that doesn't sound like much, this ultra-slim form factor lets you install the drive in ultrabooks as well as standard laptops and desktop PCs.
With the top off, you can see that Plextor has placed thermal pads on the controller, NAND flash and DDR3 cache chips. These pads transfer heat away from the components to the outer casing, which then acts like a large heat spreader.
As I mentioned earlier, the M5 Pro 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-256M5P, Plextor has opted to use Toshiba's 19nm TH58TEG8D2JBA8C Toggle Mode NAND flash chips. Looking at the picture above, you can see that there are eight of these chips on the top of the PCB. The drive also has two 256MB Nanya NT5CB128M16BP-CG DDR3 memory chips that are used for caching and garbage collection.
