In this review we're seeking to directly compare the Plextor M6e with a high quality SATA 3 drive and assess the differences (if any). In this vein we've chosen to utilise one of the best performing 2.5” SSDs to come through our offices thus far, a 480GB Corsair Neutron GTX. Driven by a Link_A_Media (LAMD) Controller rather than the more popular Sandforce, it is competitive with most SATA 3 drives currently on the market and inside consumer systems today.

Unfortunately our typical X79 SSD review platform doesn't include an M.2 slot and necessitates a swap to Z97 and Haswell specifically for this review. Due to the relative immaturity of Z97, and desire to have a broader understanding of the chipsets performance variations (which are expected to be minor), we're taking a snapshot rather than publishing our findings with the whole of our SSD results. Once we've had more experience with Z97, including the expected performance range for M.2 across these new motherboards, we'll be rolling finalised results into the full dataset.

For reference our current results listing (at the time of writing) can be found in their entirety here.



The test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place - no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed. In addition to testing the M6e installed into the M.2 slot we also intend to asses whether the use of the PCI-Express incurs any performance penalties. Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:



Test Setup: