CONCLUSION

   Plextor has been my favorite Optical media manufacturer since the mid/late 90's and although at first naturally i wasn't very pleased to hear that Lite-On took charge after signing an agreement with Shinano Kenshi right now and after seeing them expand into other areas such as SSDs i can't help but to think that this was the right choice after all. That being said the M5 Pro (PX-256M5P) may not offer anything impressive in terms of performance compared to its immediate competition but the same can also be said about pretty much every single SATA III 6Gb/s SSD currently in the market regardless of controller type (Marvell/SandForce/Samsung/Intel/Indillinx). The bundled software is however a nice touch and i know many people for who this will be one of the main reasons to choose the PX-256M5Pro over other solutions. Personally i think that warranty is something that matters a lot when talking about storage hardware and with a 5 year ironclad warranty offered by Plextor it really can't get any better especially in combination with the drives excellent performance. Only thing that's left is for Plextor to finally release their long awaited PCIex based SSDs (and 12Gb/s models although native ones will not be cheap for a long time to come) to the public for us to get some serious performance boost.

   Since the M5 Pro 256GB SSD (PX-256M5Pro) already counts roughly 10 months since its initial release you can find it currently for a very attractive price tag of USD193.43 inside the USA (Purchase Directly from Amazon.com) and for 188Euros inside the EU (Purchase Directly from Amazon.co.uk). Overall the price may seem slightly high when compared to other models in the market but we are talking about a Plextor product and at least for people who know exactly what Plextor stands for a few bucks should mean nothing in the end (the bundled software obviously ups the price a bit as well). As for us well we are always here to weigh everything a product has to offer so for excellent read/write performance and an even better 5 year ironclad warranty the PX-256M5Pro by Plextor gets our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality (Toshiba 19nm Toggle-Mode NAND Flash/Marvell Controller)
- Excellent Performance
- Bundled Software
- 5 Years Ironclad Warranty

CONS

- IOmeter Performance
- Price (For Some)