Customer Reviews

Patriot 128 GB Warp Series Extreme Performance SATA II 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) PE128GS25SSDR

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this drive based on price and benchmark numbers. Unfortunately there is much more to SSD drives than their read and write speed specs - which are very misleading.

I elected to perform an image copy upgrade to this drive using a USB->SATA dock and Apricorn's EZ-Gig software. Installation and setup were very easy. Imaging the drive was a piece of cake, and the whole process to transfer my 80GB WD HDD took about 40 minutes. I then installed the Patriot into my Dell Latitude D630 and fired it up.

First boot time was very impressive, and the applications popped off of the screen almost instantaneously. Everything was incredibly fast. Reading, writing, everything. It was an amazing difference. But keep reading.

After about 10 hours of fairly heavy use, I decided to install a couple of applications to measure the disk throughput. I never made it that far. As I was downloading one of the applications, my whole system essentially ground to a halt. The disk light was on solid, and everything was moving as through the old HDD were thrashing. Only this was even worse. The first time it occurred the system took about 30 seconds to recover. Then it happened again on the second download. I decided to restart Windows in case something was up with the OS. The shutdown of Windows took 5 minutes. No joke. Much worse than my HDD.

The next boot was fast until I go to the signon screen. Once I entered my user name and password, the disk light basically stayed on solid for about 10 minutes as the system painfully came to life. I was not happy.

I decided to go over to the Patriot site, look in the forums and try to find help there.

The forums were full of this exact story. In some cases it took days or weeks to manifest. But manifest it did. There were all kinds of helpful suggestions for registry tweaks, cache settings, disabling the page file, waving a dead chicken over the keyboard - you name it. None of this nonsense should be necessary. And it isn't. Even though A well-engineered SSD exhibits some write degradation after all of the pages have data in them, it will still outperform an HDD. Not the case with the Patriot.

Long story short, these drives and all drives built on the same SSD controller chipset have the same fatal engineering flaw that causes their write performance to degrade to about 1-2% the speed of an HDD once all of the pages have been written to. Since it's a wear leveling drive, that does not take long. About 10 hours in my case. Also, this drive has no write cache, so you are stuck with the problem any time Windows decides to flush the OS cache. Ouch. After reading some of the technical links on the Patriot forum, I was much better educated on how these drives work. It turns out Intel, Samsung and a few others have drives that do not have this problem.

Spend the extra few bucks and get the Intel X25-m drive instead. That's what I ended up doing - and I have been very happy with it since. Hopefully this review will save you the trouble I encountered. Don't be suckered into all of the silly tweaking just because you know it must be possible to get that initial fast performance back. You can't. Just buy a better drive.

I purchased this SSD over a month ago, and it was performing perfectly well. I had some hiccups(drive refuses to format in OSX) that I needed to contact Patriot for. Their support capability is essentially a answering machine that they promise to get back to you in 24hours and email.

I called them and left messages 3 times, and sent two emails with zero response. Very unprofessional.

If you are going to spend $$$ on an SSD, you might as well go for the Intel SSD... all the (blog & magazine) reviews are correct, its significantly faster. I have since upgraded and despite the smaller capacity, the performance difference is enormous and at least they will pick up the phone or acknowlege you if you ever run into issues.

I received this drive yesterday. Formatted the drive using 'Partition Magic' with no issues. Used 'Acronis True Image' to clone my D620s 120gb SATA hard drive to the 128gb Warp drive. My D620s drive is partitioned into three drives, one as OS, one for current data storage, and one for historical data storage that is seldom if ever altered. The cloning process completed with no issues giving me a total of 122gb of space. Drive loads Win XP Pro in 30 seconds, goes into hibernation in 15 seconds and has increased my battery time by over 80%. No heat issues, no noise issues just a pleasure. I did not give this drive a 5 simply from a lack of long term experience.

Boot times are fantastic. But :::::

The SSD shows severe freeze problems, in particular with outlook 2003 and outlook 2007.

After many tweaks and individual adaptations it can still be used
(see comparable problems with SSDs of other manufacturers reported here:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f17/ssd-slow-freeze-hang-vista-xp-outlook-fix-28293/) but you may as well wait for future SSD generations.

I originally had a computer with 2 WD SATA Raptors of 500GB each on a stripe, but was only using 100GB of space.
I bought two of these Patriots Warp v2 SSDs. First I tried running my system on just one, and was going to use the second one for another computer.
I noticed that, using one Patriot SSD, XP was loading fast, maybe even a bit faster than my 2-drive stripe. However, running actual applications was not faster at all. Anything that had to do with files of 100MB or bigger would be very slow.
Outlook for example, would regularly freeze for 15 seconds or so. Other applications like Visual Studio would do the same.
So I reconfigured the system to use the two Patriots in a stripe set (RAID 0). The system ran faster this time, but still froze for 5 to 10 seconds regularly.
It seems these drives deliver as promised, as long as you are reading/writing small files. Anything big results in performance degradation.

So now I am back to my 2-drive stripe of SATA Raptors.
I don't know what to do with these Patriot drives now. :(
Maybe they would be good on a laptop?

I gave them two stars instead of one because the drives still provide the advantage of being SSD drives (thinner, more sturdy, use less power). But they are overrated.

I recommend you get the new 2.5" Western Digital Velociraptor drives instead. I am already using a bunch of them in the office and they work absolutely great, and are really cheap these days.