Plextor shoots for speedy, reliable SSD market

Plextor seems to be preparing for the death of the optical drive by getting into SSDs — yesterday it announced its third solid-state disk, the M2P. The company appears to be gunning for business customers as it boasts the industry's lowest annual failure rate at 0.59 percent, offers a three year on-site warranty, and claims minimal performance degradation over time. The M2P comes hot on the heels of February's M2S, bringing a quadrupled cache (512MB) and improved transfer speeds of 500MB/s read and 440MB/s write thanks to a high-end Marvell 88SS9174 controller and MLC memory chips. The SATA 6Gb/s drive will be available this month in Europe priced at £200 (about $309) for 128GB and £383 (about $591) for 256GB. Let's hope Plextor is as good at SSDs as it was at optical drives.