Introduction

For Plextor, just making a fast and cost effective solid state drive is a starting point. The company's products are some of the most reliable on the market today, a feature Plextor uses in their marketing. The claim is an average annual failure rate (AFR) of just .59%. While this number isn't easily verified, Plextor claims their .59% is the lowest in the industry. We've written about solid state drives since early 2008 and over that course of time two issues have risen to the surface in our feedback. The first is reliability, users want to know their SSD is going to be reliable and not flake out while holding user data.

The second issue we hear about is the price. I don't think anyone will ever not list price as an issue when facing a buying decision. It is just human nature, even if SSDs were at the same dollar per GB as HDDs, people will still want the price to go down. To date, Plextor SSDs cost more than similar capacity Team LSI SandForce products. The Plextor drives have always used premium Toshiba flash, exclusive firmware/programming from LiteON and surface mount components built by Japanese firms who pride themselves on obsessive tolerances. With that in mind and the claimed industry leading AFR, we can conclude that Plextor SSDs don't cost more just for the hell of it.

The new Plextor PX-M5S appears to be Plextor's answer for producing a product that will cost less than the previous M3 Series of drives. Plextor turned to Micron to supply the NAND flash for the M5S, more specifically 25nm synchronous flash that we hear costs much less than 24nm Toshiba Toggle Mode flash that was found on the M3S and M3 Pro.

At the time of writing the Plextor M5S was not available at Newegg or any other e-tailer that we normally shop at. Plextor did send over their MSRP pricing, but we were warned these prices will not last for long.

So how does the Plextor PX-M5S stack up in price and performance to the M3S/M3 Pro models, you'll have to keep reading to find out.