Plextor's M5 Pro has been on the market for a while, and it has proven itself. Unlike other companies, there are very few horror stories about Plextor, which speaks for itself. Their M5 Pro SSD uses a custom firmware, suggesting that Plextor does extensive in-house testing and validating of their products. The long five year warranty also shows that Plextor trusts their products.

The M5 Pro delivers good performance roughly matching that of typical SandForce-based drives, but the latest high-end models from Toshiba and Samsung end up a few percent faster. The drive shines in our MySQL enterprise test with 48 and 64 threads, where it takes the lead, making it a good choice for a busy database server. When looking at price/performance, the drive does fall behind a bit. A slight price reduction would certainly help here. The M5 Pro fares better in our price-per-GB graph because it does not require overprovisioning, but it still ends up being too expensive. The five year warranty could explain the additional cost, though.

Overall, The Plextor M5 Pro is a decent drive, and I'm looking forward to the M6 which Plextor will reveal soon.