The most thoughtful inclusion with an SSD ever!
SSDs are the latest and greatest thing in storage, simply for the speed and reliability benefits that they bring to the scene. There's been one major drawback to them since release however - apart from a few prototypes at Computex, the vast majority of them come in the 2.5in form factor, just the same as laptop drives. This doesn't cause headaches when you're using one in a lappy, but when you want the same performance in a desktop system you run into problems when you go to install it - and realise that there's an extra inch missing from one of the sides!
Until now no SSD vendor has thought to really do anything about this, and while a select few Coolermaster and SilverStone cases offer a 2.5in mount now, most people have to do it dodgy or buy their own adapter. Patriot has finally stepped in an inclusion that goes with an SSD better than hydrogen goes with oxygen - they've chucked in a 2.5in to 3.5in adapter inside the box! Such a simple inclusion, but it saves all the fuss and added expense later on.
The drive itself is pretty fast too, with an average read of 214.3MB/s, an access of 0.1ms and a burst of 237.6MB/s. Copying the Crysis install gave an average of 172MB/s write, but strangely when copying the Program Files folder it would only hit 70MB/s. It seemed to have trouble with lots of small files at once, but otherwise was nice and speedy. It didn't heat up at all under load, and like most SSDs didn't make any perceptible noise.
One of the biggest downsides of SSDs are the cost - this one weighs in at almost $5 per gigabyte, and of that only 119GB is usable when formatted. Still, for a fast and large drive with included bracket you can't go past the Torqx.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009