 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Plexstor M5 Pro. This is their new flagship SSD drive. And let's start with just sort of an overview of the packaging. So this is cool. 7mm height for ultra slim notebooks. So they have improved the compatibility of their drive by reducing the height of it, which we're starting to see as a bit of a trend with SSD manufacturers. This is good because ultra books are not going away and we're going to continue to need slimmer and smaller storage devices that maintain the performance standards that enthusiasts demand. Speaking of maintaining performance standards, this features their exclusive firmware with their TrueSpeed technology. TrueSpeed technology sounds like the kind of thing that you would find on like, you know, a motherboard box where it's like, maintain more performance and more better over time. So the reality of it is TrueSpeed is not, is not snake oil. TrueSpeed is real. TrueSpeed is Plexstor's way of saying that their firmware, through exclusive algorithms and through the talent of their engineering team, Plexstor firmware is able to better maintain the like new speed of the drive over time compared to their competitors. It has been tested, it has been validated by third party sources and it's very, very impressive. So Plexstor is sort of like, here, how do we compare them? They're sort of like Intel in that they are the company that is doing the firmware, they're doing the validation of their drive, they're doing the manufacture of their drive, but they're not actually the designer and manufacturer of the hardware chip controller that goes on it. So Plexstor's M5 Pro is actually using a brand new controller, here, we'll start opening it up here. This is Marvell's newest, latest controller. So you know Marvell controllers from high performance drives in the past, such as Plexstor's own drives or Crucial drives. However, Plexstor is the first one with the 8855-9187 controller and I know that's not a sexy name, but what Marvell seems to, well, seems to be capable of doing is delivering wicked controllers and what we know that Plexstor is capable of doing is delivering wicked firmwares. So I'm very excited to see how this drive performs once we actually get it fired up. It's using Toggle NAND, which again is the fastest, most premium NAND, which stands to reason because this is not a cheap and expensive drive. It's got 512 megs of cache, that is DDR3 1333 cache, which is one of the fastest caches out there. So it is, well, it's state of the art. This new controller from Marvell is actually technically SATA 3.1. So even though that looks like a standard SATA, SATA 2, SATA 3 data and power connector, it actually supports a couple of new things, including most importantly the ability to prioritize trim commands. So it not only supports trim, but it can wait to do trim in order to finish some outstanding IOs and then execute the trim command in order to improve efficiency as long as you have a compatible controller on the other side of the data connection. So this drive, I can tell you guys right now, is pretty much at the top in terms of the sequential read and write performance. However, there's a lot more to it necessarily than that when it comes to drive performance. So you can see what's their specs. So they're saying up to 540 megs per second reads and up to 450 megs per second writes. So those reads are the fastest out there and the writes lag just a little bit behind the vertex for random read and random write IOPS again are pretty much class leading. So I'm expecting very, very good performance from this drive. Their mean time between failure is 2,400,000 hours. So remember guys, mean time between failure uses an industry standard method to determine what the average time for failure for. I think they have to use something like however many hundreds of drives at a time, they run them all through a standardized test and see how many of them fail and after how long to determine how long it would take for the drives to fail on average. Let's just see if they have anything else to say for themselves besides that. So enterprise standard, high temperature burn in process, Plexter instant restore technology, maintains SSD performance. Oh right, so you can restore it to a like new state using their tools very, very easily. I did forget to mention that. Low power consumption, disk cloning and backup utility included. Neat. Okay, so yeah, let's have a look at what's included in the box. So we've got a two and a half inch to three and a half inch adapter, all the mounting screws you need, although if you're installing it in a notebook, which you can because it's slim, it'll probably come with the mounting adapters that you need. A Ziploc baggy includes, oh neat. Oh neat, look at that, comes with that SSD performance analyzer. I mean I guess they're not shy about their performance because they're Plexter. I mean I had a meeting with them and they were like, yeah, yeah, we're pretty much the best when it comes to quality and performance. I actually didn't even know this at the time, but they're one of the top manufacturers in the world. So a lot of the drives you buy with other brand names on them may actually be manufactured by Plexter, so bear that in mind. I included software echo, backup now easy and bonus trials, Ninja software trial, Shadow software trial, MediaMaker software trial. Okay, interesting. Quick installation guide, limited warranty. This is a five year warranty product, so they are standing behind it there. Sorry, I did forget to mention that on the front. So that is right up there with competing products like the Intel 520 series and the OCZ Vertex 4. So there you have it, that's the unboxing of the Plexter M5P. This is the true successor to the M3P using a last generation controller and this is a very exciting time for SSD enthusiasts. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos!