Final Thoughts and Rating

...if you need a solid, fast and relatively inexpensive upgrade to an mSATA-accepting machine, the Plextor PX-128M5M is a fine fit.

The minimal physical resources required for solid-state drives make them an ideal candidate for being presented in a wide variety of small form factors. Most often seen in 2.5in SATA-connected drives, another connector called mSATA is now becoming popular in the latest generation of thin-and-light laptops.

Plextor has taken the know-how from the desktop M5 Pro drive and repurposed it here, albeit at slightly slower speeds. We have no qualms about the performance of the SSD, but the widepspread mSATA 3Gbps limitation inhibits the drive from really showing its worth.

The current state of play means the M5M's appeal rests largely with high-specification Ultrabooks that rely on mSATA storage alone; users would be better advised to use a 2.5in SSD for all other notebooks. But if you need a solid, fast and relatively inexpensive upgrade to an mSATA-accepting machine, the Plextor PX-128M5M is a fine fit.

The Good

128GB mSATA for £90
Top-end credentials
Latest NAND and controller
Super-easy setup and usage

The Bad

Usual 3Gbps motherboard interface inhibits performance

HEXUS Rating

Plextor PX-128M5M

HEXUS Awards

Plextor PX-128M5M

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Plextor PX-128M5M is available to purchase from Scan.co.uk*

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But here's the obvious rub; this ‘Ultrabook’ features a regular SATA interface that will happily accept all 2.5in SSDs, matching the Plextor's performance, so there's really no reason to add mSATA unless you want to increase overall capacity.

Isn't there a lot of mileage in using an mSATA SSD for OS/programs, and a large mechanical drive for bulk storage? Most laptops don't come with 2 sata bays, so there's got to be a reasonable use case there, no?

scaryjim
But here's the obvious rub; this ‘Ultrabook’ features a regular SATA interface that will happily accept all 2.5in SSDs, matching the Plextor's performance, so there's really no reason to add mSATA unless you want to increase overall capacity.

Isn't there a lot of mileage in using an mSATA SSD for OS/programs, and a large mechanical drive for bulk storage? Most laptops don't come with 2 sata bays, so there's got to be a reasonable use case there, no?

Indeed! It will be nice to see laptops coming with small msata ssd boot and large mechanical even 7200rpm drives for storage.

For those limited to one 2.5 bay and no msata etc, remember seagate did (still does?) a hybrid 7200rpm drive with a small ssd cache built in.

This review is useless, it shows the limitations of sata 2.0 and not the performance of the drive. It would be better to review this drive with an msata to sata adapter or a laptop with a 6GBps msata.

I agree with what noodles2k said above… a good little ‘box’ to test it in would have been one of the new Intel NUC's which do have a 6 Gbps interface.