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, Samsung 960 PRO 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 S3C 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 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, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the S3C is based on SMI's SM2254 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 S3C 256GB |
 Plextor S2C 256GB |
According to Plextor, the 256GB S3C is capable of reading at 550 MB/s and writing at 510 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.
 Plextor S3C 256GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 Plextor S2C 256GB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The S3C performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 563.1 MB/s and write at 522.2 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the S3C's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the S3C had average read and write speeds of 470.2 MB/s and 175.5 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 454.0 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that, like most other TLC-based SSDs, the S3C uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 410 MB/s and then drops to about 175 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache. The cache on the 256GB version of the S2C is also surprisingly small. It appeared to be about 4GB in size, which is about 1.5% of the drive's total capacity.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the S3C'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 S3C 256GB |
 Plextor S3C 256GB |
When tested with ATTO, the S3C's read speeds topped out at about 563 MB/s and its write speeds at 511 MB/s.
