Patriot SSD 64GB Review

[neufuse Veteran]

Patriot Memory SSD SATA Warp

With the world quickly moving to more efficient devices and higher performance, I felt it was time to try out Solid State Drives (SSD). The world seems to be in a slow transition to Solid State Drives (sometimes known as Solid State Disks; however it?s not actually a disk in the sense we normally perceive a disk). I was looking for a simple, yet effective solution. At this time most drives are still in the $200+ range for a 64GB. I happened to pick up two Patriot Memory SSD Solid State Disks for $179 each, after a $50 rebate on each drive from Newegg.com. The drives are both version 2 drives, which correct some issues that existed in the original Patriot Memory SSD drives. The drives are available in 32/64/and 128 GB models.

The drives I purchased where model number PE64GS25SSDR which are listed as SATA I / II drives. The drive is around the standard 2.5? hard drive size. Their dimensions are listed as 3.9? wide by 2.8? deep and only 0.4? high. The drive only weighs about 3 ounces. A nice feature of the SSD drive is it is certified to be used in RAID arrays, some SSD drive manufactures do not suggest you use their drives in a RAID array due to its writing patterns, however, this drive claims it supports RAID0, 1 and 0+1. The drive is RoHS compliant also. One of the real nice features of SSD drives are the fact they are very resistant to external shock, such as dropping a laptop or using it in a car over a bumpy road. The max shock for this drive is listed at 1500G for 0.5ms. The max vibration resistance is 20G at 10 to 2000 Hz. The Mean time before failure (MTBF) is also listed at 1,500,000 hours or about 171 years.

ow to format a drive with 512 byte allocation units in vista<[/b]png' alt='b]png'> (This is just one test out of many averaged together)

How to format a drive with 512 byte allocation units in vista

I know it sounds like a duh, just format it answer. The problem is though, if you run setup for windows vista and click format there, it defaults to 4KB with a 1024 block sector offset. SSD drives are created with a physical 512 byte unit. To get the best performance out of them, you should format the drive to match the allocation unit of the drive. For the patriot SSD drives, it is of course 512 bytes. If you need to create, partition your drive and format it in vista setup, before you go into the actual setup you can go into command prompt and do this manuall. When you are on the Windows Setup screen that has the button to go into the main installation wizard, at the bottom there is a system tools / recovery link, most people never notice this link. If you click it, it takes you to system tools, such as memory diagnostics, and command prompt. Launch command prompt. Use the command DISKPART to create your primary partition. You can do that by running DISKPART, then LIST DISK to get a list of drives in your system, type SELECT DISK #, replace number with the drive you want to create a partition on, then type CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY, this will make the partition the whole size of the drive, or HELP CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY for more options you can use. After this you need to assign a drive letter, after selecting the disk, do a list partition to get the partition number then SELECT PARTITION #, after that type ASSIGN LETTER=C to set it to the C: drive for windows. Now we have a partition manually set up, format it! Exit out of diskpart by typing exit. After this type FORMAT C: /FS:NTFS /V:VolumeLableHere /A:512 this will format the c: drive in NTFS with the specified volume label and the 512byte allocation unit size. Now you can exit out of command prompt, you should reboot the computer, as reboot and shutdown are the two options in recovery mode in Vista setup, then proceed to setup the system like normal, be sure not to format or create new partitions in the setup screen for selecting a hard drive to install to! This will erase your 512byte allocation unit you just setup ower Usage Comparision<disk and click next. This should help improve the speed of the drive and use it to its max potential.

Power Usage Comparision

I used a small device called a ?Kill-A-Watt? to compare the power usage of the system running in RAID0 mode with two 7200K RPM hard drives versus the same system running with 2 Patriot memory drives in RAID0. To max out the power usage, I did a full disk wipe (DoD standard) for one hour 4 times each setup then figured out the power consumption averaged. The RAID0 7.2K RPM system used ~49 watts more energy in the time then the Patriot Memory SSD drive setup!. The total power consumption of the system running with SSD was 112 Watts, while when running with standard hard drives in RAID it was almost 167 watts. This was with the drives working at max capacity. There is defiantly a power advantage to SSD, as the drives consume as little as one watt of power per drive on max load. The Patriot memory drive however does not havether drive Information<t as already low power. You cannot shut off the drives completely unless a full system power down occurs.

Other drive Information

Some other things that the drives do not support, Power Management, Acoustic Management (of course), NCQ (Native Command Queuing), they are not firmware upgradable, they do not support HPA?s (Host protected areas) and do not have a write cache. Write cache would be nice because when the drives are under high load, the system does see performance drops. This is something that can be mitigated in standard hard drives with larger write caches onboard. Write caches are usually RAM and much faster than the flash memory or rotational media. In my opinion, SSD makers need to add at least 8MB of roblems Noticed<memory to the device to remove some of the bottle necks that are caused by read and writes while using the system.

Problems Noticed

As I just mentioned in the other information section, there are problems you notice with SSD drives. One of the largest ones is when you are writing to the drives, it can cause system locks for a second or two if the system simultaneously tries to read. This is something that is mitigated by write caches on rotational media, but on current generation SSD drives there is usually no high speed write cache to save money. I have noticed that when installing applications, the time it takes grew about 35% on average. Windows Vista x64 which took about 30 minutes to go from install to first launch desktop on a rotational media RAID0 setup, now took 43 minutes. However, after the installation things did run faster eat and Sound generated vs. standard drives< is significantly larger then x86 versions of vista which install in about 19 minutes)

Heat and Sound generated vs. standard drives

These drives seem to generate virtually no heat. My standard rotational media drives generate a good amount of heat during heavy usage; I have noticed almost no increase in heat from the SSD drives. They after 5 hours of usage, feel cool to the touch.

Sound wise, it feels odd not hearing your computer doing things. It sometimes feels like the system is stopped because of the lack of noise from the SSD. There is no noise at all from the Patriot Media v2 SSD he big issue with some, defragmentation< who love silent systems. If you want rid of noise, I would highly recommend these drives.

The big issue with some, defragmentation

People like to tell you ?do not defragment a SSD drive, in fact disable automatic defrag?, I think this is incorrect. Even with the higher access times, having to read random locations on the media still slows down the drive?s performance. I ran tests on a new vista install and saw that a fragmented SSD drive showed similar slowdowns as you would get on a standard hard drive. The decrease in performance of course is not as great as a standard hard drive, but it still slows down. Upon defragmenting the drives, there was a large improvement in performance. One test I did was to backup 39 GB of information using Acronis TrueImage 11 Home edition. The SSD drive fragmented severely took 28 minutes to back up with maximum compression. The same drive defragmented (using Disonclusion<ssional) only took 19 minutes to backup completely. Both backups where done to external media that can write at about 30MB/ps.

Conclusion

If I was to pick between Standard rotational media and SSD drives from Patriot Media, I?d have a hard choice, the speed is great with SSD, but the lack of write cache causing random slowdowns in the system go get annoying fast. All other factors included I would say the SSD is the way of the future, and hopefully Patriot memory and other SSD creators can improve and fix some of the current issues. I would rate the Patriot Media 64GB SSD v2 an 8.5 out of a possible 10.

[neufuse Veteran]

If anyone wonders why I tested two 80GB Hard drives, instead of something newer and larger, I was trying to keep the drives as similar as possible and 80GB was the closest I had to 64GB laying around

[ToneKnee]

If anyone wonders why I tested two 80GB Hard drives, instead of something newer and larger, I was trying to keep the drives as similar as possible and 80GB was the closest I had to 64GB laying around

Very nice review! :)

Just out of curiosity for people who own or know about SSD's, are their models out there with the 'Cache memory' which neufuse advises his drives have? Or are they all the same? As in, no/low high speed cache?

[Dessimat0r]

Nice review, I'm impressed :) As for fragmentation, I think we need the OS and SSD to work together to eliminate it and add other features. I heard that there was a problem where access would slow down around boundaries of banks of memory on the SSD. As far as I can see, this could be eliminated by running a staggered RAID 0 array where one RAID SSD had a starting point of the centerpoint between the start and the next boundary.

[neufuse Veteran]

Sorry for any grammer issues, wrote this kind of fast to get it done! been meaning to write up the results for a week now... just never had the time, as for write cache, some of the really expensive SSD's out there have it

[Neztea]

Very Nice Review. Though One question. Is there a SP2 for Vista anyways? :)

Neztea

[Skulltrail-old]

? Sequential Reading ? 157.0 MB/ps

? Sequential Writing ? 68.20 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Reading ? 137.90 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Writing ? 35.90 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Reading - 14.71 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Writing ? 1.81 MB/ps

? Average Access time 0.2 ms (barely one fifth of a millisecond!)

??Forth Test ? Two SSD?s in RAID0t ? Two SSD?s in RAID0

This was the same test as the hard drives in RAID0 test. This test was also run with an Intel MATRIX RAID controller with a 128KB strip in RAID0. The volume was formatted with 512 byte allocation units as per the drive?s storage specifications.

? Sequential Reading ? 244.9 MB/ps

? Sequential Writing ? 140.1 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Reading ? 225.5 MB/ps

? Random 512KB Writing ? 76.23 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Reading - 16.26 MB/ps

? Random 4KB Writing ? 2.262 MB/ps

? Average Access time - 0.2 ms

? Burst Rate 134.7 MB/ps

Absolute ownage. I need to get my hands on one of these SSDs ASAP. Surely beats using an 30GB iPod Video (Black/5G) as an external HDD.

I would rate the Patriot Media 64GB SSD v2 an 8.5 out of a possible 10.

I'd rate it a 9/10. The tests was amazingly good; I rate your experiment a 10/10. Great job.

[neufuse Veteran]

Very Nice Review. Though One question. Is there a SP2 for Vista anyways? :)

Neztea

Whoops, ment SP1, sorry!

[ToneKnee]

Absolute ownage. I need to get my hands on one of these SSDs ASAP. Surely beats using an 30GB iPod Video (Black/5G) as an external HDD.

I'd rate it a 9/10. The tests was amazingly good; I rate your experiment a 10/10. Great job.

While 9/10 would be a nice score, the slow down issue would do my head in badly to be honest.. :/

[Skulltrail-old]

While 9/10 would be a nice score, the slow down issue would do my head in badly to be honest.. :/

Point taken, but that would just require a routinely scheduled defragmentation which I do once every two weeks. It wouldn't be a huge problem. Defragmentation is necessary for all HDD, including SSD.

[ToneKnee]

Point taken, but that would just require a routinely scheduled defragmentation which I do once every two weeks. It wouldn't be a huge problem. Defragmentation is necessary for all HDD, including SSD.

Problems Noticed

As I just mentioned in the other information section, there are problems you notice with SSD drives. One of the largest ones is when you are writing to the drives, it can cause system locks for a second or two if the system simultaneously tries to read. This is something that is mitigated by write caches on rotational media, but on current generation SSD drives there is usually no high speed write cache to save money. I have noticed that when installing applications, the time it takes grew about 35% on average. Windows Vista x64 which took about 30 minutes to go from install to first launch desktop on a rotational media RAID0 setup, now took 43 minutes. However, after the installation things did run faster in terms of launch times. (This is Vista x64, which is significantly larger then x86 versions of vista which install in about 19 minutes)

I was more on about this point which I've bolded. I don't know very much about SSD's or if it's just a problem with the low-end SSD's compared to the high-end expensive ones.

[neufuse Veteran]

I was more on about this point which I've bolded. I don't know very much about SSD's or if it's just a problem with the low-end SSD's compared to the high-end expensive ones.

Just to point one thing out, I only noticed pauses as long as a second or two when installing software, windows unrelated to the installation would just pause or go to "Not Responding" when interacting with them.. during normal usage this isn't as noticable

[ToneKnee]

Just to point one thing out, I only noticed pauses as long as a second or two when installing software, windows unrelated to the installation would just pause or go to "Not Responding" when interacting with them.. during normal usage this isn't as noticable

Umm, I think I would need to personally use them to make my mind up to be honest. Though, the whole idea of SSD is brilliant, I don't know if I should wait another year or 2 so the prices can come down. Imagine 4 of these in RAID-0? Or 8 of them doing RAID-0+1 or RAID-5? LoL

[neufuse Veteran]

Umm, I think I would need to personally use them to make my mind up to be honest. Though, the whole idea of SSD is brilliant, I don't know if I should wait another year or 2 so the prices can come down. Imagine 4 of these in RAID-0? Or 8 of them doing RAID-0+1 or RAID-5? LoL

I actually have my hands on 8 of them right now, and we've been testing them in RAID 1+0, and well, let's just say, it puts our SAN to shame... *LOL* we were getting read speeds as fast as 500 MB/ps but this is on a high end RAID controller with 512MB cache and battery backup, in those tests... thought the people here would be more interested in desktop tests :)

Which I think I should of added to my review.. the fact you can buy dedicated RAID controllers with dedicated RAM for write caching... even with one drive you can still take advantage of this! You can get them as cheap as $99 for one with 128MB of write cache RAM, no batter backup though... good ones will cost you $$$ though

The cheap Intel MATRIX RAID controllers don't have dedicated write cache memory... they are designed for home use only, we solved our speed problem by using a dedicated $99 RAID controller card

Edited October 9, 2008 by neufuse

[ToneKnee]

I actually have my hands on 8 of them right now, and we've been testing them in RAID 1+0, and well, let's just say, it puts our SAN to shame... *LOL* we were getting read speeds as fast as 500 MB/ps but this is on a high end RAID controller with 512MB cache and battery backup, in those tests... thought the people here would be more interested in desktop tests :)

Which I think I should of added to my review.. the fact you can buy dedicated RAID controllers with dedicated RAM for write caching... even with one drive you can still take advantage of this! You can get them as cheap as $99 for one with 128MB of write cache RAM, no batter backup though... good ones will cost you $$$ though

The cheap Intel MATRIX RAID controllers don't have dedicated write cache memory... they are designed for home use only, we solved our speed problem by using a dedicated $99 RAID controller card

Would be nice to see some real world examples of the speed, like Application installation and so on! :)

[neufuse Veteran]

Would be nice to see some real world examples of the speed, like Application installation and so on! :)

I wish I had some more time to do some home use examples, but at work we are testing it with SQLIO (the Microsoft SQL Server I/O Simulator) and it gives a relatively good improvement on our SQL Server performance in the test environment... but this is in the 8 SSD drive RAID 1+0 array, our standard SQL Server array is 14 drives in 1+0 with hot spares of course... so 8 SSD disks are keeping up and out performing 12 RAID 1+0 drives (2 hot spares) but this is of course with a high performance RAID controller... I wish I had Office Bench or some other benchmarking software around to do some real software tests!

[kilimanjaro]

Very useful report. Thanks for taking the trouble to run the tests and write it up. :)

I am waiting for SSD prices to drop to affordable levels before I take the plunge. I simply cant justify it at the current $/GB ratio. :(

[kilimanjaro]

Nice review, I'm impressed :) As for fragmentation, I think we need the OS and SSD to work together to eliminate it and add other features.

Apparently the main problem with fragmentation and SSDs is free space fragmentation that causes slower writes. According to teh Google, Diskeeper and Apacer are currently collaborating to optimize SSD performance. It's not entirely clear how the Hyperfast optimization software works (probably proprietary info) but the numbers in the whitepaper seem to indicate that the performance difference is significant. :huh:

http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/HyperFast.pdf

[neufuse Veteran]

Apparently the main problem with fragmentation and SSDs is free space fragmentation that causes slower writes. According to teh Google, Diskeeper and Apacer are currently collaborating to optimize SSD performance. It's not entirely clear how the Hyperfast optimization software works (probably proprietary info) but the numbers in the whitepaper seem to indicate that the performance difference is significant. :huh:

http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/HyperFast.pdf

That's exactly what I was seeing, fragmented SSD's slow down write speeds, and have some impact on read speeds also... yet most people that haven't tried it will tell you "you should never need to defrag a SSD" I know I've heard that before, even from experts in the field... yet, in pratice, it just doesnt work... the "access time" being so fast was theoretically supose to compensate for fragmentation, but you still have to jump all over to get to it, just in a different way now (no head move and rotational delays)... in the end, defraging the drive in my tests at least showed a significant improvement in read and write speeds

[Ci7]

That's exactly what I was seeing, fragmented SSD's slow down write speeds, and have some impact on read speeds also... yet most people that haven't tried it will tell you "you should never need to defrag a SSD" I know I've heard that before, even from experts in the field... yet, in pratice, it just doesnt work... the "access time" being so fast was theoretically supose to compensate for fragmentation, but you still have to jump all over to get to it, just in a different way now (no head move and rotational delays)... in the end, defraging the drive in my tests at least showed a significant improvement in read and write speeds

gotta agree

but you wouldnt need to defrag it as much as as a HDD ,not the current gen of SSDs at least

[neufuse Veteran]

gotta agree

but you wouldnt need to defrag it as much as as a HDD ,not the current gen of SSDs at least

Yep, I agreee, you dont need to defragment as much, but still a full defrag every month or so would probably help, or have diskeeper do its thing as it sees fit

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

hey great review neufuse... those SSDs in RAID 0 friggin fly. fyi, you typed 'MB/ps', but the '/' is the 'p'. should be MB/s ;)

[coolvi]

Good review!

But regarding the defragmentation issue, Technically, any time you need to jump around and try to read/write data in multiple pieces, despite the type of medium used, there's going to be a slowdown. Heck, that's why there're even RAM defragmenters! I just don't think any manufacturer has officially stated that you don't need to defragment SSD drives. They simply suggest users not to defragment these SSD drives because these are MLC-based flash memory devices which have very limited write cycles (as low as 10,000). Therefore, excessive writing processes will kill the drives faster! SLC-based flash drives don't have this downside as they are as durable as normal HDD's (1+ million write cycles).

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Excellent review neufuse. I think I'll switch over to SSDs once the intermittent system lock-up issue is resolved.

[neufuse Veteran]

Couple pics added, and a screenshot... sorry about the large pic size, very little time...