Plextor M2 Series 128GB SATA 6Gbps Marvell SSD Review

Plextor M2 Series – Internals

Opening the drive reveals four pads set strategically to help mitigate physical shock and keep the guts safely in place.

On one side of the PCB lies the NAND in four modules which show the imprints of the aforementioned pads.

The 34nm MLC NAND is branded Toshiba and carries the part number TH58TVG7D2FBA89. There are eight total modules, each 16 GB in density for a total of 128GB on board.

On the other side, in addition to the NAND, lies the Marvell controller and the SDRAM cache.

The Nanya branded DD3 SDRAM cache is 1 Gb (note the lower case “b”, equaling 125 MB) in density. This helps the controller by buffering the data to prevent stuttering that was prevalent in the first generation SSD drives.

The Marvell controller is model number 88SS9174 which we saw on the Micron RealSSD drive albeit a different revision. Unlike the SandForce controllers that are so popular, it doesn’t rely on data compression to boost overall speed. It supports TRIM and idle collection to keep things running smoothly. On to the Benchmarks!