Patriot Warp v.2 Series 128GB SSD review - Introduction

Ever since last year we started reviewing Solid State Disk drives and guys, I've said it many times before already ... it's the future. Surely several things need still to be addressed. But the technology is now is advancing in such incredibly fast rate that even reviews wise, it's hard to keep up with the development rate of SSDs.

The first ever SSD we reviewed was the OCZ Core SSD. We were impressed at what it offered in terms of performance. What was that .. slightly over half a year ago? Meanwhile three things have changed in the wonderful world of Solid State storage devices. The first is speed (aka performance); it's nearly sickening how fast these drives are getting. Drives with read speeds up-to 250 MBps (megabyte per second) are already a reality, drives with 170 MBps write speeds are no longer a secret either. In fact we are closing in very fast on the limits of SATA II specifications in terms of the bandwidth in-between the SSD and your motherboards SATA II controller.

I stated three things changed. The second one is volume (aka the size of SSD drivers have become bigger). And that was needed for it to be able to compete with regular drives. 128 GB and 256GB models can now be purchased. The third factor that changed is the pricing model. Though SSD driver still are very expensive, they have become much more affordable than say two years ago. There's a large discussion on whether you should opt for an MLC or SLC based SSD (we'll explain this in the article), but the fact is .. only MLC is the way to go from a price perspective point of view. Personally, I would like to see SLX become the norm, as it's lifespan is 10x longer.

But yes, in fact prices have shrunk 2 maybe 3 times already ever since that moment. What of course helps is the cutthroat competition on the market. All companies see an opportunity, and thus many manufacturers are jumping the SSD train. Heck, everybody wants a piece of this scrumptious pie. As such, there is a lot of competition. And competition is always very much welcomed, as it drives the evolution of the technology forward real fast .. that and prices of course go down.

This is where we land at the premises of Patriot memory. Not too long ago they released an SSD series of drives. They branded it as the WARP series.

Recently they even released a 256GB (V3) model. Very beefy stuff. The folks from Patriot, who originally are a US memory manufacturer, is now offering SSD drives as well. The first offering they have submitted for a Guru3D review is their second revision (v2) WARP SSD drive, it's a 128 GB model and I keep repeating myself after each SSD review .. it's faster yet again.  It comes with an advertised read performance of 175 MB/sec and a 100 MB/sec write speed, how on this earth could we not like that ?

Let's startup this review, have a peek at the product and then let's head onward to the next page.