Patriot Warp SSD 128GB

Not quite as fast as the fastest, but with a lot more wriggle room.

Patriot, long held in reverence for its dependable memory at decent prices, is the second player in the consumer SSD market that we’ve seen. Does its attempt at a storage device rival their mastery of memory?

In the compact (some might even call it ‘sporty’) 2.5in form factor, the drive is about 1.5cm thick, and is again slightly larger than a business card. Weighing in at only 91g, this is lighter than most MP3 players, and is built very solidly – though don’t go throwing it around.

The interface is the one we all know and love – SATA. You’ll receive this drive packaged just like a stick of RAM, inside a specially moulded plastic shell that holds the drive firmly in place – safe from potential damage. There is no adapter included in the retail packaging that would allow an increase from 2.5in to the standard 3.25in, which would have been nice, but the good thing is that it is so light you can screw it in damn near anywhere that there is space for it.

Filled with NAND chips (albeit slower than Intel’s), you get a relatively large 128GB of space – this is whittled down to 119GB when formatted. An average transfer speed of 136.9MB/s was recorded, 19 per cent faster than the WD Velociraptor. Maximum speeds peaked at 161.93MB/s, with latency at a respectable 0.2ms. This is still very fast, and is a notable improvement over traditional hard drives that can take much more time to begin moving.

Compared to the Velociraptor, this drive had a marginally noticeable speed increase in game loading times, as well as boot times for the OS. Browsing the usually slow filesystem was much improved; never again will you have to wait for the drive to start moving to access files. The unit itself even managed to remain cool when under heavy stress from our benchmarks, with no noticeable temperature increase at all – though it did make faint beeps and blips when being accessed (similar to an icecream truck, but with random noises instead of Green Sleeves). This wasn’t loud enough to be heard further than ten centimeters away; for the most part the Warp was inaudible.

The Warp has the largest amount of storage space that SSD’s currently reach, and a speed that tops the current champion in the traditional HDD market. For the price, this is a great way to access solid state computing with just enough storage space to make it worthwhile – great for a laptop upgrade. We’d definitely want one of these in our rigs.