Plextor to Enter the Market of Enterprise Solid-State Drives.

Plextor to Make Enterprise-Grade SSDs

[12/06/2012 11:55 PM]
by Anton Shilov

Plextor, a leading designer of advanced storage products, said Thursday that it would enter the market of enterprise-grade solid-state drives. The official product announcement and details will be made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early 2013. So far Plextor has only produced high-performance SSDs for prosumer and professional markets.

This announcement comes on the heels of the introduction of the M5 Pro, which gained accolades from the media as one of the fastest Serial ATA-6Gb/s SSD on the market. Earlier this week Plextor released a firmware update that transforms the current M5 Pro into the M5 Pro Xtreme, a professional SSD capable of delivering even higher IOPS and read/write performance. The M5 Pro and the M5 Pro Xtreme are based on Marvell 88SS9187 controller and Toshiba NAND flash memory with Toggle DDR interface made using 19nm process technology.

In addition, the M5 Pro Xtreme is the first drive to feature Plextor’s True Protect unique enterprise-grade double-data protection technology. The first element in True Protect is a multi-layer system to ensure the highest level of data integrity, combining the latest 128-bit error correction built into the Marvell controller with Plextor’s exclusive firmware-based Robust Data Hold-out algorithm. True Protect’s other element is protection against data theft using 256-bit AES full-drive encryption for maximum confidentiality. The M5 Pro Xtreme retains the features that define it as a true professional SSD; this includes a calculated mean time between failures of 2.4 million hours.

The merits and advances of the M5 Pro and M5 Pro Xtreme raises expectations regarding what Plextor will be announcing for the enterprise segment of the market.

Going enterprise is a natural next step in the evolution of Plextor's SSD development. Plextor has consistently developed SSDs that deliver sustained speed over the long-term with the lowest annual failure rate in the consumer SSD industry, the company claims.

Tags: Plextor, SSD, M5 Pro, M5 Pro Xtreme, NAND, Flash, Marvell, Toshiba, 19nm

Discussion

Comments currently: 2
Discussion started: 12/07/12 08:56:23 AM
Latest comment: 12/07/12 09:25:51 AM
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[1-1]

Plextor has been selling to consumers. No one knows who the Hell "prosumers" are... Some enterprise customers purchase consumer grade SSDs, but not those who actually require top reliability and compatibility. That segment of enterprise wants the real deal not the half-baked crap often sold to consumers.

So far Plextor's consumer level SSDs seem to be pretty trouble-free unlike many other brands/models. This may be the result of actually taking their time to get up to speed and properly validating their products, instead of rushing half-baked crap out the door as many companies often do.

I would expect if they can be cost competitive in enterprise and meet the other requirements, they may do fine sales wise. If they have no experience with enterprise needs nor sales then they will have a steep learning curve.

Be advised that MBTF figures mean absolutely nothing in the real word and are purely theoretical SWAGs or Scientific Wild Arse Guesses. In addition, enterprise is not so concerned with blazing speed as they are with reliability, compatibility and TCO.