PLEXTOR MIGHT NOT be one of the big players in the SSD market space, but the company is now readying its first SATA 6Gbps SSD and we’ve got some early benchmark figures to share with you, as well as some details of the new drive family.

There will be three drives in the new series of SATA 6Gbps drives, namely the PX-256M2S, the PX-128M2S and the PX-64M2S. As the model names suggest, the new drives come in sizes of 64, 128 and 256GB. All three models will use a Marvell 8-channel flash controller, although Plextor didn’t specify the controller model. All three drives also feature 128MB of DDR3 cache memory.

Plextor has also added TRIM support and global wear levelling to keep the SSDs in a “clean” condition. On top of this, Plextor appears to be one of the first companies to announce support for ONFi 2.1 and Toggle mode support. ONFi 2.1 brings with it enhanced ECC support, better power management and improved performance, while Toggle mode helps increase both the read and write performance of SSDs.

So that brings us to the most important part of an SSD, performance. Plextor claims sequential read speeds of up to between 380 and 400MB/s depending on the model and sequential write speeds of up to 180 to 200MB/s. Plextor had a demo unit running in its booth which was being benchmarked with HD Tune Pro 3.50 and the 128GB drive on test managed an impressive average sequential read speed of close to 389MB/s.

There’s of course more to SSDs than the sequential read and write speeds, but these early numbers are still impressive and way ahead of Crucial’s RealSSD C300 which is some 100MB/s behind in the read test. The Plextor drives are unlikely to be much faster than the fastest SSDs on the market today in terms of write speeds, in fact there are already faster models out there, but the read speed of these new SSDs looks to set some new records, at least for the time being. The new models will be out in September, but we were unable to find out how much the MSRP will be.S|A

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Lars-Göran Nilsson

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