M5M mSATA 256GB

The Plextor M5M is the most recent mSATA SSD I have looked at. It has both the same controller and NAND flash (albeit with fewer channels) as its regular SATA sibling, the excellent M5 Pro. The performance figures for the M5M lag the top nine SATA group leaders by around 30% on average. The weakest area of core performance is shallow queue 4K write speed which clocks in at 57 MBps on the M5M vs a group average of 118 MBps. In terms of server orientated performance, the M5M takes 13th place out of 29 with an AS SSD total score of 946. That said it's only fair to look at the M5M within the context of other mSATA SSDs. It's not a clear cut performance win between the M5M and the Intel 525 Series but the M5M is retailing for 23% less. Unless shallow queue random writes are a top priority for your use case the M5M is the clear value winner, and my top mSATA pick for 2013. ^{[Oct '13 SSDrivePro]}