Patriot SSD 64GB Review


Recommended Posts

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.

index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=206028

p><p><a class=post-47883-1223780423_thumb.pngow 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.

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/680212-patriot-ssd-64gb-review/
Share on other sites

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?

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.

? 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.

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.. :/

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.

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.

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

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

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 by neufuse
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! :)

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!

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

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

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

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

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).

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Windows ME was worse.
    • Dude, im talking about simply disable it from settings app. Because of the eu regulation, you could disable it here for years.
    • One big question about Mars was answered thanks to Einstein's 100 year old theory by Sayan Sen Image via DepositPhotos Scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have calculated how time passes on Mars compared with Earth, adding detail to how timekeeping would need to work beyond Earth’s orbit. The study, published in The Astronomical Journal, found that clocks on Mars run an average of 477 microseconds, or millionths of a second, faster per day than clocks on Earth. A microsecond is one millionth of a second, a very small unit used in precise scientific timing systems such as atomic clocks, which measure time using consistent atomic behavior. This difference is not constant. Because Mars moves around the Sun in a non-circular path (an eccentric orbit, meaning its distance from the Sun changes over time instead of staying fixed) and is affected by gravity from other bodies, the daily difference can vary by as much as 226 microseconds over a Martian year. The study also identifies smaller repeating changes of about 40 microseconds per day linked to synodic cycles (repeating periods that describe how planets line up with each other as they orbit the Sun from different positions). These longer patterns affect how time differences slowly rise and fall. To make these estimates, researchers compared Mars with Earth and the Moon. The work looks at relativistic proper time (the time actually measured by a clock depending on its speed and the strength of gravity where it is located, as described in Einstein’s relativity). This shows that each world has its own slightly different “rate” of time. This becomes more important as space missions expand into cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon) and toward Mars. On Earth, time systems rely on atomic clocks and satellites, which stay closely synchronized for navigation and communication. The study is based on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which shows that time is affected by gravity and motion. Stronger gravity makes clocks run slower, while weaker gravity makes them run faster. “The time is just right for the Moon and Mars,” said NIST physicist Bijunath Patla. “This is the closest we have been to realizing the science fiction vision of expanding across the solar system.” A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than on Earth, and a Martian year lasts 687 Earth days. But the main question is not just about days and years, but how fast time itself passes. An atomic clock placed on Mars would function normally, but compared with one on Earth, the two would slowly drift apart due to differences in gravity and motion. This requires careful calculation of what is similar to a time-zone difference across planets. Researchers modeled Mars using a reference surface and included gravitational effects from the Sun, Earth, the Moon, and other planets. This includes a multi-body gravitational system (often described as a three-body or four-body problem, where predicting motion becomes difficult because multiple large objects all pull on each other at the same time through gravity). Mars also follows a Keplerian orbit (an idealized elliptical orbit based on simple gravitational laws that assume smooth motion, before adding real-world disturbances from other bodies). In addition, the researchers accounted for solar tides (small changes in gravitational force caused by the Sun that slightly distort planetary motion and timing, especially in systems involving Earth and the Moon). These combined effects are described as relativistic proper-time offsets (small but measurable differences in elapsed time between locations caused by gravity and motion), which must be included when comparing clocks across planets. “But for Mars, that’s not the case. Its distance from the Sun and its eccentric orbit make the variations in time larger. A three-body problem is extremely complicated. Now we’re dealing with four: the Sun, Earth, the Moon and Mars,” Patla explained. “The heavy lifting was more challenging than I initially thought.” Although the differences are extremely small, they matter for navigation and communication systems that depend on precise timing. Even modern networks on Earth, such as mobile systems, rely on timing accuracy at very small fractions of a second. Communication between Earth and Mars currently takes about four to 24 minutes or more depending on planetary positions, meaning signals are not real-time. A shared and accurate time system could help future missions reduce confusion in navigation and data exchange. “If you get synchronization, it will be almost like real-time communication without any loss of information. You don’t have to wait to see what happens,” Patla said. Researchers note that fully developed interplanetary communication networks are still far in the future. However, understanding how time behaves across planets helps prepare for those systems. “It may be decades before the surface of Mars is covered by the tracks of wandering rovers, but it is useful now to study the issues involved in establishing navigation systems on other planets and moons,” said Neil Ashby. “Like current global navigation systems like GPS, these systems will depend on accurate clocks, and the effects on clock rates can be analyzed with the help of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” Patla added that the results also help improve understanding of time itself under relativity. “It's good to know for the first time what is happening on Mars timewise. Nobody knew that before. It improves our knowledge of the theory itself, the theory of how clocks tick and relativity,” he said. Source: NIST, IOPscience This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.
    • TeraCopy 4.0 Build 26 by Razvan Serea TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, also providing you with a lot of features. Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives. Pause and resume transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click. Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer. Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files. Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual. TeraCopy is free for non-commercial use only. For commercial use you need to buy a license. The paid version of the program includes the following features: Copy/move to your favorite folders. Save reports as HTML and CSV files. Select files with the same extension/folder. Remove the selected files from the copy queue. TeraCopy 4.0 Build 26 changelog: Added support for receiving files via the LocalSend protocol. Improved exception handling and automated bug report upload. Fixed several minor bugs and small memory leaks. Build 26 (June 24) Fixed a rare exception when a transfer completed. Features added since version 3.17: Enhanced speed graph. New multi-threaded copy engine. Support for copying to multiple targets. Queue system for managing multiple copy operations. Support for receiving files via the LocalSend protocol. TeraCopy entry in the modern Windows Explorer context menu. Integrated toolbar in the title bar. Why receive LocalSend transfers with TeraCopy? Handle file conflicts: Skip, overwrite, or rename files when a file with the same name already exists. LocalSend always creates another copy, which can waste time and disk space, especially when resuming an interrupted transfer. Filter unwanted files: Apply ignore lists or remove files manually before accepting a transfer, so unnecessary files are not downloaded. Better performance on fast networks: In tests over a 10 Gbps connection, TeraCopy received files several times faster than the standard LocalSend app on Windows. Download: TeraCopy 4.0 Build 26 | 14.5 MB (Freeware, paid upgrade available) View: TeraCopy Website | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Briefly used Turbo Pascal (and Turbo C++) in 97 and soon after that I bought PC magazine that included a full version of Delphi 2. I still use Delphi today, some 29 years later.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Grand Master
      Jaybonaut went up a rank
      Grand Master
    • One Year In
      Philsl earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Dedicated
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • First Post
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      First Post
    • One Month Later
      D0nn13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      453
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      177
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      124
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      78
    5. 5
      Xenon
      76
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!