Plextor M5P Xtreme Series PX-256M5Pro 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: It's an SSD
No moving parts
Built well.

FAST!!! Really fast!

Cons: No cons

Other Thoughts: Making the move from a mechanical drive to an SSD is a huge jump in performance. Well worth the purchase if you are in the market.

Pros: fancy marketing words, none in actuality

Cons: I bought a few plextor SSD over 4 months. 128 GB and 3 256 GB, all the M5 Pro series.

I did not have time to benchmark them when I bought them, but I noticed they did not perform as you would expect for the "one and only" SSD to break the 100,000 IOPS barrier. So, I went online and downloaded their latest firmware (currently 1.03). There have been rumors on the net about a 1.03 firmware with issues but I would have not imagined that a big name company to deliver such a poor product in a completely misleading marketing manner.
I tried to upgrade these SSD by individually connecting them on 2 different computers, both ASUS motherboards with the latest BIOS, sabertooth and P8Z77. On both computers, initially in IDE then in AHCI modes, the update of the firmware would hang and not finalize properly as indicated in their (Plextor) update document.

All in all, all plextor M5Pro SSD deliver a sequential write speed of about 140 MB/s (advertised 450 MB/s). My Western Digital enterprise 2 TB has a close sequential write speed suggesting something is fishy in Denmark.

Moreover, I contacted their support and they told me tier 2 tech support will get back to me once I sent an email with benchmark images reported by a tool they've (Plextor) recommended and told me they've used: AS SSD.
No reply from their support so far.

Conclusion
Product: poor performance, not performing as advertised
Customer service: poor

I WOULD STAY AWAY FROM plextor unless you want to pay top dollar for a gold ring and get a fancy brass ring instead. And no magic powers with it!

Pros: Ok I wrote a previous review that ripped into Plextor because of their archaic way of updating the firmware on their SSDS through ISO files burned to a optical disk and then in turned booted to the SSD for the update. Needless to say it did not work on my Snow Leopard equipped Mac or my friends Mountain Lion equipped Mac Book. Apparently it wants to be done from an internal sata connection and not a USB external Anyways I don't think I need to elaborate on that more.

Plextor apparently reads reviews and took it to heart. They issued a a prepaid packing slip to RMA the drive. Then about an hour after getting that notice they went ahead and cross shipped me a New Drive with the latest Firmware flashed to it. This is something I did not expect them to do. I am quite happy about this. Unfortunately I had to go out of town for a week before the new drive arrived so I will have to pick it up from Fedex when I get back. I give Kudos to Plextor for taking the initiative after initially dropping the ball. Lets hope they update their update process to a downloadable disk image that you can boot off your desk top like most modern firmware and software updates. I hope to see this drive perform well now because its well rated and benchmarked.

Cons: no cons now

Pros: My second RMA'd SSD drive arrived. Installed without any problems. My dual HD HP DV-7 Notebook has never been so quiet and fast with the combo of this SSD & 16GB HyperX CL9 Memory also bought from Newegg. Boots to Windows 8 in less than 20 seconds.

Cons: My first SSD had to be RMA'd. When I installed the first SSD it had 5 partitions on it. Strange but I thought that was normal for my HP DV7 notebook. NO not the case.... When I hooked up the second RMA'd SSD drive it had only one partition from start. The bad HD had 5 partitions. My conclusion if your brand new SSD has 5 partitions there is probably a problem with it. If a brand new SSD makes a bunch of partitions on its own it must have bad sectors or something.

Other Thoughts: This second SSD is just AWESOME!!!! Blazing fast and worth every penny spent. Go ahead and buy your protected first with Newegg's 30 day and Plextor gives a 5 year warranty. Don't worry the bad drives are replaced. My RMA only took 8 days total with Newegg. Newegg ROCKS!!!!

Pros: One of the fastest drives for heavy load work on the market.

Cons: Terrible way for updating software. Plextor seems to be stuck in the early part of this century as far as updating firmware goes. Instead of having downloadable installs that put diskimages on your desktop to upgrade from they still rely on ios disk install images. What this means is if you get one of their SSD's made prior to March of this year it has firmware 1.0.2 on it. The latest firmware is 1.0.3 which you have to download from their website and burn a ios image to optical disk DVD or CD. Once doing this you have to boot your computer and force it to boot off the optical drive to install the firmware. Now the problem here is not everyone has optical drives in their computers anymore. Can we say Ultrabook, Macbook Air, Mac Mini, the list goes on. But lets get on to the nitty gritty about this fiasco of an update. Its also latest OS specific so if the computer you are using to do it from does not have the latest version of the OS windows or Mac it does not want to load. Then there is the other fact that It also does not like being done from an external drive case on a USB port or Firewire port. All of this leads to Plextor telling you that you either have to go into your computer and switch it from sata to achi. Perhaps Windows guys do not mind doing this but I have never ever had to attempt to do this on a mac which involves going into terminal and changing command lines. The other suggestion was to install the drive in a the computer before trying to update the firmware. Now if for any reason it should not work you then have to remove the drive from the computer again. Sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy depending on the computer.

I speak of of this because this is the nightmare I have been gong through for the last week. I was going to buy this drive from Newegg but got it for $5 less from another vendor who managed to get it to me overnight even though they were out of state. I am guessing their supplier was in state. Regardless the only remedy Plextor has offered is for me to RMA the drive to them at my cost of getting it to them.
I do not feel a customer should have to go through this to get a update firmware on their drive.
All in all I am most likely going to RMA the drive to the retailer and get a different brand. Customers should not have to jump through this many hoops to get the drive to work

Pros: None so far

Cons: SSD would not partition or format. 10000's of format errors

Other Thoughts: Really hope Newegg comes through with a good drive this time. RMA Pending.

Pros: My Windows 8 HP DV7-7234nr laptop with 16gb of ram will boot up in less then 20 seconds with this drive...WOW!!!!

Superfast drive running 512mb cache you wont find a faster drive then this drive. Silent and cool. Cant even hear my laptop anymore when it is on.

Cons: The drive only lasted 2 weeks and wont turn on. At first the pc would not turn back on if turned off for like 1 minute. After a few days it wouldn't turn on at all. Hooked the ssd up to an external usb 3.0 port and put it up to my ear oooooch!!! it just clicks and clicks....Had to RMA my first drive. Thank g*o*d for Newegg's 30 day no hassle returns. This can happen with any HD thats why you must run them hard the first 30 days make sure you have a good one. Once they work for 30 days without problems they will last forever.

Other Thoughts: Will do another complete review when I get my new drive back and have it running for months.

Pros: Actual speeds seems to match up with the published specs. They don't seem to with a lot of SSDs but on this drive you get what is stated. So far, the fastest SSD I've worked with, not that you can really tell by much when compared to the next fastest.

Cons: None, price and performance are good.

Other Thoughts: Cheaper than the highest end comparable popular Corsair & Samsung, quicker and with 16GB more. Very slim for an SSD, as slim as they get.

Pros: This drive is fast when it comes to both boot and application load times. Never experienced one blue screen like other drives I used and is wayyyyyy faster than my last SSD (180GB Intel 520). It was quickly recognized; Win7 installed in less than 10 minutes which surprised me. Comes with bracket for desktop installation. Drive uses the lastest Marvell controller (88SS9187) and uses 512MB (2x256MB) of DDR3 1333MHz for its buffer; Uses 19 nm Toshiba Toggle memory.

Cons: Missed the sale!

Other Thoughts: When I received this drive it worked out of the box flawlessly but with Firmware 1.02 (At the time of this review, the Firmware was recently upgraded to 1.03). All I had to do was download an ISO, burn it to a DVD, boot from DVD after POST and it found and wrote the firmware to the drive no problem. I didn't even need to unplug my other drives!

Pros: It's a fast SSD, everything installed without a hitch and so far so good.

Cons: None