Plextor has hit up the ever growing SSD market with a new line of SATA 6Gbps drives in regular 2.5-inch form. There are currently two drives in the new lineup, the 128GB PX-128M2P and 256GB PX-256M2P, both of which depend on Marvell's 88SS9174 controller together with Toshiba TH58TV68D2FDA88 MLC 34nm NAND flash.

With 512MB DDR3 cache on the 256GB model and half that (256MB) on the 128GB, sequential write speeds vary between the two with Plextor promising write rates of 440MB/sec and 320MB/sec on the 256 and 128GB drives, respectively. Read rates, however, are equal at up to 500MB/sec.

Other included features of the new Plextor drives are SMART, NCQ, TRIM, Bad Block Management, Instant Restore and Plextor TrueSpeed firmware. As for pricing, with the drives first showing up in Japan we can get an idea from the JPY pricing of 46,800 (about $610 US) on the 256GB model and 21,800 (about $284 US) on the 128GB.