Plextor PX-M2 Series 256GB SATA 6G Solid State Drive Review

AIDA64 Random Access Time

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.60
Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com
Product Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

AIDA64 offers several different benchmarks for testing and optimizing your system or network. The Random Access test is one of very few if not only that will measure hard drives random access times in hundredths of milliseconds as oppose to tens of milliseconds.

Drives with only one or two tests displayed in the write test mean that they have failed the test and their Maximum and possibly their Average Scores were very high after the cached fills. This usually happens only with controllers manufactured by JMicron and Toshiba.

I've added the Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB back to the access time charts after writing a couple of reviews without it. The SSD only results were starting to give the appearance that a thousandth of a second actually meant something when comparing SSDs. It really doesn't. Access times are what make SSDs 'feel' fast in your computer when opening documents, windows, games, programs and even booting your PC. As you can see in the chart, the difference between a very fast platter drive and any SSD is remarkable.

You may think that just because all SSDs read data quickly, they all write quickly as well. That isn't a correct assessment. We've tested SSDs that have very poor write access time after the cache module fills up with data. This resulted in write access times that were actually longer than that of a typical platter drive. Thankfully those drives are not on my chart.

The Plextor M2 does really well accessing data and is in line with many of the industry leading SSDs on the market.