Patriot Warp V.2 128GB SSD

So you think SSD’s are ready for Prime Time as your main hard drive? Patriot hands us their 128GB Warp V.2 and says have at it.

Manufacturer:

Price: Check

2009 has already been the year of the SSD.
Not only has the price
point dropped drastically in the SSD space, there is much more to
choose from.
You can go Ultra Expensive with SLC or Moderately
Expensive with Intel MLC and of course a slew of competitors in the
Cost Effective MLC space.

has been adoring our front
page often over the past few years with a great price/performance
ratio, they have sent us one of their latest SSD offerings to compare
against that good old standby, the spinning hard drive…
I now
present the Warp V.2

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For those that have not been graced with the holding of an SSD drive, you notice instantly that the thing is tiny, and is fairly light considering its a Hard Drive, of sorts. Let’s take a look at the features and specifications for the Warp V.2 SSD shall we.

Features

2.5”
HDD Form Factor
SATA
I/II Compatible
Silent
Operation
Low
Power Consumption
Shock and
Vibration resistant

Specifications

128GB
SSD
Up
to 175Mb/S Read
Up
to 100Mb/S Write
Supports
RAID 0, 1, 1+0
MTBF
> 1,500,000 Hours
Data
Reliability: Built in BCH 15 bit ECC
2 Year Warranty

While the specifications of most SSD offerings want you to focus on MB/stransfer rates, there is much more to a system drive then moving large files about. Just a short time ago there was a controversial review by about, well, basically anything outside of Intel’s X25-M/E SSD’s. While I respect Anand’s point of view, as well as his technical fortitude, I feel he leaned a little to heavily on synthetic benchmarks for his conclusion. Today we will try to focus on actual use of the drive in day to day scenarios that you and I would perform along with a few synthetics. Why don’t we see where this takes us?

First let’s start by looking over the Patriot Warp V.2 first. Packaging is done nicely, as Patriot is known to do, there are, of course, no extras. Patriot adorns their SSD with a smooth yet bubble surface Aluminum skin as well as a label that describes the size and model of the drive.

Opening the case we see only electronics, truly nothing “exciting” inside the steel trappings, and there you see the JMicron 602B controller, this is the controller that has been discussed on so many forums.

Testing:

For our testbed we have chosen the MSIx58 Platinum paired to an i7 920 with 3 sticks of 2GB Super Talen tPC3-12000.

I will be comparing the 128GB Patriot Warp V.2 to a Seagate Barracuda320GB 7200.10.

I will of course use a few Synthetic Benchmarks, as there does need to be some sort of a baseline, however, I am going to be relying heavily on actual tasks. So the list of tests that we will be performing are as follows:

SiSoftSandra Disk Benchmark – A synthetic test suite that includes some IO tests

EverestUltimate Disk Suite – A synthetic test suite that includes some IO tests

PhoronixSuite – A Linux based suite of tests (we will be using Ubuntu 8.10 patched to current for this round)

IOzone – A R/W test of your disk subsystem

Audio Encoding - We will encode .WAV files (stored on the SSD) to MP3 / OGG / FLAC

GnuPG File Encryption – We will sign SSL certs and encrypt large files

Boot Times – From the completion of P.O.S.T to the launch of a few applications (automated) we time how long it takes.

Left 4 Dead – We time how long it takes to get from the main menu in L4D to actually playing in the game.

SiSoft Sandra:

A synthetic, read only test that gives us some baseline numbers that you can easily compare against.

It is fairly well known that the read performance of SSD’s is much faster then that of a spinning drive, this benchmark proves that out.

Everest Ultimate Disk Suite:

Everest has a nice little synthetic test suite for hard drives, unfortunately, this is a read only test. Here are the images from both drives.

As you can see, the Patriot Warp V.2 out performs once again in the synthetic benchmarks.

Phoronix Suite – IOzone:

IOzone is a nice snap shot of drive performance as it relates to file size, read and write.

Here is where the spinning drive starts to compete; larger file sizes, sustained writing/reading, is a weakness of SSD’s. That being said, outside of the 8GB write, all of the results are rather close and not enough for me to give a hands down win to the Seagate. I don’t know about you, but I don’t write many 8GB files to the drive so…

Phoronix Suite – Audio Encoding:

Some more life like testing with encoding audio, this test uses WAV files stored on the hard drive and encodes them to your favorite flavor; we used MP3, Ogg and FLAC.

As you can see, real world performance is almost identical here, no true cut winner/loser in this list of results.

Phoronix Suite – GnuPG FileEncryption / SSL signatures:

Working in tandem with memory and CPU this tests out the Hard Drives ability to facilitate large file encryptions and handle a slew of small but important SSL signatures.

Here the Patriot performs rather well, my guess would be that the read in of the file to be encrypted is that much faster on the Patriot Warp SSD and compensates for the slight write performance advantage of the spinning Seagate.

Boot Times:

This is pretty simply really, how long does the system take to get to your main screen (auto login on Ubuntu and Windows 7) and launch its first application fully (I used OpenOffice.org Writer for this scenario).

Now those charts are down right revealing, either using Linux or Windows your time to boot up and launch a single application is ½ with the Patriot Warp V.2 SSD compared to the spinning Seagate hard drive.

Left 4 Dead:

OK, now for some truly real world applications; I am timing how long it takes from the main menu in Left 4 Dead to the point in which you are in the first person of your character (single player mode to take net interference out of the scenario).

Ouch, that is a serious time difference, I mean, if you are fighting for the 4^th spot,wouldn’t it be nice to know you can launch into the game that much faster? This for me is a real world win!!!

Look and Feel:

This can be very subjective, some people are much more sensitive to pauses and delays then others. Gamers, however, are a pretty defined bunch when it comes to system performance. I have little tolerance for a system that causes my game to pause or stutter, especially when I am in the middle of a high action sequence. To this end I delayed the publishing of this article over one week while I used it as my main drive.

MyOS (win 7 Build 7057), my Virtual Drive, my games and all of my Apps were installed on the Patriot Warp V.2 drive. Prior to starting this phase of testing I performed a few tweaks on the drive as follows:

UltraDMA Mode 5

WriteCaching Enabled

Disabledthe Indexing Service

DisabledAutomatic Defragmentation

I can say that the time went by with barely a hitch, I launched applications (I wrote most of this review on the Patriot Warp V.2SSD) including a little movie editing and playback, browsed the Internet with both IE and FF, played a few L4d and Quake 3 games, chatted on IRC/IM while letting Avast scan everything on the way in and out. The only thing I didn’t have running during this test was Thunderbird, its just to much a PITA to move it over . I had neir a hint of a stutter or bottleneck. The only issue I had was a single lock up in L4D, where I had to reboot the system. The lockup can be attributed to many scenarios, of which the Patriot Warp V.2 is a possibility, however, the rest of the system, not to mention the OS (which of course, is still in beta) are also high probabilities in the lock up. I did start to see the "slowdown" Anand mentioned in his article start to crop up here and there, well, either that or over time my expectation of snappy increased as I used the system more and more, granted installing a few OS’s and allowing my SSD to be the Swap Drive isn’t your day today scenario and surely accelerated the full SSD issue. Hopefully, Diskeeper or the like, will introduce a program soon enough that will tune your SSD for optimum performance at all times, therefore alleviating this issue all together.

Unpluggingthe Patriot Warp V.2 and putting the spinning drives back in (yes, I run 2Seagate 320′s in RAID 0 as my main drive on a day to day basis) is when I noticed lag and delays. While I understand the points made by many readers in many forums across the net, I must say that after using the Patriot Warp V.2 in my system for over a week and running several tests on it, I have yet to see a drawback to using this SSD as my main drive. It must also be noted that the intention of this review, as well as the assumption to the purpose of the people reading this, is that of replacing their spinning Hard Drive with an SSD variant. In this decision matrix, cost is going to be a huge deal breaker for a lot of readers (including me), Patriot, with it’s V.2, is going to fit into their upgrade plans very well. I will, however, keep this review “open” as it relates to stuttering or lags as I will be replacing my drives with the Patriot Warp V.2 SSD full time. If anything shows up, I will be sure to update that information here.

FinalWords

With SSD drives making the mainstream push, has positioned itself well. They have a good reputation behind them as well as a house hold name when it comes to memory devices. While an SSD is a memory device, many of the consumers out there are much more accustom to seeing Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor et all as the dominating names when it comes time to purchase a Hard Drive. Patriot is in a new division, whether the device is or isn’t, technically. The Warp V.2 performs day to day operations faster then your typical spinning hard drive. While the write speed is not up to pa rwith spinning drives on larger files, this reviewer feels that the overall experience points to the Warp V.2 SSD as a cost effective, highly noticable upgrade to your good old standby spinning hard drive.

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