TRIM Performance
Plextor calls their garbage collection "True Speed". They are quite heavily advertising the dirty state performance of their SSDs, although I have to say that I haven't found their SSDs to be anything special in this regard. As we already found out in the performance consistency test, Plextor relies heavily on idle garbage collection: When the drive has no other tasks to complete, it will start cleaning up itself.
For starters, I ran a secure erased M5M through HD Tach to get the baseline performance:
As usual, I followed up by filling the drive with sequential data and then hammered the drive with 4KB random writes (QD=32) across all user-accessible LBAs for 60 minutes. I then ran HD Tach to graph the data:
Performance does get pretty bad, but that was expected given the performance consistency (the lower the random write speed is after torture, the worse the HD Tach graph looks). Next I TRIM'ed all user-accessible LBAs and reran HD Tach to make sure TRIM work as it should:
And it does.
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