Patriot 128GB Warp Flint MI

With the RAM drives offering little in the way of capacity, and most of the flash SSDs in this Labs test being just 32GB or 64GB, the Patriot 128GB is the largest SSD.




Its price of £2.48 per gigabyte is cheap for an SSD, and with claimed read and write speeds of 175MB/sec and 100MB/sec from its MLC NAND flash memory, the 2.5in S-ATA II128GB Warp is a very appealing SSD.




HD Tach 3 RW soon put these claims to the test, though, and reported an average read speed of 144.6MB/sec and 53.1MB/sec write speed. Both of these results are slower than Patriot claims, but this is a common trait with many MLC NAND flash drives and is caused by the huge write latency of the JMicron memory controller, which slows down data being written to the memory cells. The read speed is incredibly quick, however, and second only to the stellar Intel flash drives and ACARD RAM drives.




Despite this, though, the 128GB Warp gave an average performance in our Media Benchmarks with a score of 1,360 in the GIMP image editing test and 1,124 in the multitasking test.




Despite having a faster read speed than the HyperDrive4 RAM drive, it was four seconds slower in the search test, taking 14 seconds to complete. It was a similar story when loading Crysis, although the HyperDrive4 was only one second quicker. Even so, the 128GB Warp is much faster than any hard disk at loading games.




Although it has double the capacity of the 64GB Warp, the 128GB Warp's retail price isn't double that of the 64GB version. With games and applications becoming larger all the time, some of the smaller SSDs would make poor investments, as they'd very quickly run out of space.





The 128GB Warp might not be as fast as some other drives, and the RAM drives generally walk all over it, but the extra capacity and non-volatile memory means that the 128GB Warp could be a good upgrade for your laptop or as a dedicated game install drive in your desktop.

Author: James Gorbold & Antony Leather

Custom PC Online