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 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:
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Price: Check
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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
Specifications
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.
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