The Verdict
Other then price and volume there's very little for me to not recommend a drive such as the Patriot Warp V2 128Gb model SSD. It's gorgeous, very speedy. I can only imagine how their V3 256GB model will perform .. that's a good amount faster as well.
The drive as shown today can be picked up for roughly 300 USD. If you are eBay savvy you'll notice that you can find them even for 250 USD, and while that's still 1.95 USD per gigabyte we can conclude that SSD drives have reached a turning point. It entered the middle segment of the high-end market.
SSD drives are fast, amazingly fast. But sure, they do come with one culprit, when you have loads of small files (smaller than 16KB) written at once or consistently, that's where the Achilles heel of any SSD drive is to be found. Traditional HDDs are much faster in that area. If you'd use an SSD as boot drive, you can easily bypass that bottleneck by disabling stings like the Vista Prefetcher and search indexer. Also disable drive defragmentation, this will ensure a longer life-span.
When you look at the other side of the scope, the SSD will eliminate any traditional drive in it's way after you pass that 16KB block file size. A SSD, like the one shown today, still gives me wrinkles in my forehead whenever I run tests and observe that speed.
Obviously the usage of an SSD doesn't eliminate the need for a traditional HDD. The new model VelociRaptor for example manages to match this SSDs write performance. But lacks nearly a quarter to a third in read performance. It's a tradeoff, value and noise wise.
Also, HDD's are of course fantastic as cheap storage devices. They just can't touch a fast SSD when it comes to speed though. Therefore, if you are in the market for an SSD drive, you need to think about that you are going to do with it.
If you work on that PC a lot, chances are good that you want it as the ROOT, C:\ windows drive. Fast performance and no noise is just fantastic. If you are a gamer, you just might settle for a nice HDD as boot drive and install your games at a SSD device, you'll seriously decrease level and game load times very much.
If you 'backup' DVDs and store them on your PC, there where an SSD is not interesting. You do not need speed, performance or anything like that. Get some decent volume storage like a 1 TB Western Digital, they cost 120 USD these days. So if you are in the market for an SSD, think about what you'd be using it for and design that PC of yours optimally around the storage devices. That way you'll enjoy the PC very much. Me? I have a 128Gb SSD as ROOT drive. I work with the PC all day, want the speed and love the silence. But sure, prices still will need to come down even further.
The Patriot Warp V2 series SSD comes very much recommended, if you are in the market for one, definitely check them out. It was among the fastest MLC based drives we tested thus far and drips of pure adrenaline. Not cheap as storage unit, but very much recommended none the less. What a lovely product.
* update, the drive just dropped in price towards $259.99
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