Plextor PX-128M1S Solid State Drive Review
Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Standard layout for an SSD.


Double sided PCB, controller on the front, cache memory at the rear.

Marvell '88SS8014-BHP2' controller.
Code named "Da Vinci".

Samsung flash and 64MB of HYNIX DDR SDRAM.
Testing Methods
Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world
benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File
Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you
have any questions about our tests just drop into the
Storage Forum and we'll help you out!
Test System Setup
We have switched our testbed over to a more dedicated,
forward thinking machine. We made some changes to help minimize test
data scatter with higher bandwidth devices. Sound is flat out disabled,
with no additional card installed. Video was *intentionally* shifted
to a PCI unit to free up both PCIe-16 slots for testing tandem pairs of
PCI Express cards (like ioDrives, DDRDrives, and high end
RAID cards). Spot checks against the previous rig showed a
negligible change in test output.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and
BFG for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled) |
| Motherboard | Asus P6T |
| Memory | Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI |
| Video Drivers | Geforce 181.22 |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
| Operating System | Windows XP X64 SP2 Windows 7 X64 (for TRIM testing) |
- PCMark05
- Yapt
- IOMeter
- HDTach
- HDTune
- PCPer File Copy Test

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