In the last couple of years, Solid State Disks or SSDs have become more prevalent in the marketplace. The prospect of owning was but a dream for most mere mortals not only in terms of price, but also in terms of availability. Today there are multiple vendors, supply is somewhat decent, and everyone is starting to work their marketing magic to strategically price their products. With this added competition, drives are getting cheaper, faster and most important larger.
A little while ago, we had a great hands-on experience with the Kingston 128GB V-Series Solid State Drive; an entry level SSD that gave us a usable amount of storage and better than hard disk performance. Most importantly, it was affordable. Today we’ll be checking out something from the folks at Patriot Memory that takes the technology to another level. The new TorqX series is Patriot’s answer to the performance challenge. In this review you’re going to see why we’re dubbing this one a “torque monster”.
Features and Specifications
The important thing to keep in mind here is that the TorqX Series has been designed for sheer maximum performance as its specs show. The drive is made with Patriot’s best Extreme Flash NAND which allows it to offer up to 260MB/s sequential read and 180 MB/s sequential write speeds. This performance is available in both the 128GB and 256GB models. The line is equipped with 64MB DRAM cache and uses the Indilinx 1DX110m00 controller which is one of the best currently available.
Patriot also offers a 64GB TorqX SSD built with similar NAND flash. Transfer rates are a bit lower clocking in at 220MB/s sequential read and 135 MB/s sequential write speeds but this might just be because it is a slightly older product. Typically, the larger drives tend to be the slightly slower ones due to the quantity of chips required to assemble each one. Despite that, the 64GB still measures up faster than most drives in its size and price point. Ultimately, it will come down to your motherboard’s host controller and how it interacts with the SSD controller if you want to see those big numbers.
As always, a few of the features that make SSD technology so promising is its durability for mission sensitive objectives. This means that whether your using one in a desktop or laptop computer or in a UAV (Unmaned Aerial Vechicle), you can expect it to get the job done from 0 to 70 Celsius. Since they have no moving parts like conventional hard drives, they can’t be affected by turbulence or evasive maneuvers.
Something that comes built in to the enitre TorqX SSD series that you can’t see is a 10 Year Warranty. This is the longest warranty ever offered by a manufacturer on any storage device. This is a testament to the quality and confidence Patriot has in to their TorqX series. This should put your minds to rest if you had any concerns about just how long these drives are expected to last. Our TorqX 128GB sample should hit the streets at around $360 US.
What’s In The Box?
Patriot Memory provides a fairly bare bones bundle with the exception of a drive caddy, rather than a pair of drive rails in which to mount your sacred SSD. The solution provided is actually quite a bit more elegant than some of the ones we’ve come across. Instead of just being some bare piece of bent metal, Patriot decided to paint this thing black and throw their logo on it. We mentioned that we were a little disappointed with the 2.5 to 3.5 inch drive adapters that came with the Kingston SSD V-Series 128GB drive and we think it’s nice to see some thought go into this.
Also gracing the package is a basic installation manual and some screws in which to mount the drive to the adapter plate. There is no software or driver CD required as the drive is automatically recognized as just another SATA drive in your system. The little black jumper you see there is used for flashing the drive if the need ever arises to do so. Simply plug the jumper in to the SSD and begin the flash process.
Back in Black
The TorqX SSD is housed in the safest color chassis of choice: Black goes with everything after all. They’ll also look neat and tidy as you start to stack them into a massive array of SSD goodness.
As with almost all SSDs, the TorqX is considerably smaller and also much lighter than a conventional hard drive. It really is amazing the amount of weight you can shed from your computer case by using an SSD. Where four heavier 3 pound drives that made up your RAID Array once sat, only two of the drive bays are now taken up. Your system is now at least twelve pounds lighter and potentially faster. As 512GB SSD capacities arrive, you’ll definitely start to find more of these inside LAN Party machines.
Test System Setup
In order to create a worthy environment in which to test this high performance drive, we’ve assembled a system using the following hardware components.
- Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition [D0 Stepping] Processor
- ASUS ROG Rampage II Gene X58 Micro ATX Motherboard
- Kingston HyperX 6GB 2000 MHz DDR3 Triple Channel Memory Kit
- ZOTAC GeForce GTX295 Video Card
- Patriot Memory 128GB TorqX Solid State Drive (As Reviewed)
- 1000 Watt Kingwin Mach I Power Supply
- Torture Rack Case by DangerDen
For comparison purposes, we will be comparing the TorqX 128GB SSD against the recently reviewed budget/entry level Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB SSD drive and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATAII 7200 RPM Drive. Our operating system of choice was Windows Vista 64 bit and all latest BIOS, firmware and drivers where installed prior to testing.
TorqX Installation Notes
As mentioned earlier, Patriot Memory gives us a nicely made 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch drive adapter that is painted black and emblazoned with their logo. This is far more attractive that the boring bare metal rails that accompany some drives and far easier to install. However, it was kind of odd that the adapter doesn’t center the drive, but where else would they put the Patriot logo?
The process goes pretty much the same as any other hard drive installation, although you do notice that things go quite a bit faster once you start loading the OS. The only word of caution is in regards to defragmenting your drive: Don’t! This can lower the lifespan of your very expensive Solid State Disk. Windows, especially Vista and 7, have options to individually set which drives should be defragmented. Simply uncheck the SSD drive and apply the settings.
Testing the Torque of the TorqX
One thing that can present a challenge when benchmarking storage devices whether a regular or SSD, is that there isn’t really any kind of set standard. There are plenty of programs that will benchmark your hard drive(s) using different internal testing methods. For that reason we chose benchmarks which include SiSOFT SANDRA, ATTO Disk Benchmark, and Intech Software’s QuickBench. Each benchmark allows us to look for specific things to give us a better understanding of how a drive performs overall. You’ll be seeing these benchmarks a lot as we start cranking through more drive reviews in the near future.
SANDRA
If you’re not familiar with SANDRA, it’s one of the most comprehensive software benchmarking solutions available that can tell you everything you want to know about your system as well as test it. The reason I’m including SANDRA is because SISOFT offers a “Lite” version that you can download and use if you’d like to compare your own system’s Physical Drive performance to others.
It will come as no shock to you that both SSDs more than doubled or tripled the performance of the SATA II drive. It would take a RAID configuration or a 10,000 RPM hard drive like the Western Digital Velociraptor to match the performance of the entry level 128GB V-Series. The 128GB TorqX is just a superb performer rounding out a very strong 182 MB/s write speed which pretty much made my Seagate Barracuda seem like it wasn’t doing anything.
ATTO
This has been proven to be an extremely handy program that seems to provide more realistic benchmarks while breaking down 4K up to 8.1MB data block performance. It offers about as close to a real world data transfer rates as can be expected while using a 256MB file while utilizing any Disk Caching capabilities. Overlapping Input/Ouput was enabled to challenge the storage drives.
First up are the results of a Seagate 500GB SATAII drive. Naturally, these drives aren’t going to produce any big numbers unless they’re in a RAID configuration. Having it here does give you an idea of performance of under 1TB capacity drives. We should have some 1TB results to include in our next round of testing to hopefully give our platters a fighting chance.
Here, you can see an entry level Kingston 128GB V-Series SSD in action. The results here are almost double the write rate and more than double the read rates of the Seagate 500GB SATAII platter based drive. Here we can see some of the small block write limitations of this budget SSD offering.
And finally, you can see the excellent performance one can expect from their ever so capable TorqX SSD. You can also see that the TorqX doesn’t suffer from any low small data block transfer rate issues that seemed to plague some older SSD. The Indilinx controller does a much more efficient job of directing the SSD’s performance.
QuickBench
I’ve found QuickBench to be a simple, yet thorough program that’s capable of providing realistic Sequential and Random R/W performance. It can test larger mid-range 20MB to 100MB file transfer rates as well as break down data block performance. Since this particular benchmark is cross platform between Mac and PC, you’ll see it pop up in our testing with Apple products. This allows us to do some meaningful comparison with similar drives.
Before testing, Disk Caching was disabled to eliminate any discrepancies associated with chipset and controller performance. When enabled, you can expect about a 10% performance gain depending on your particular system.
Again, first on the chopping block, the screenshot from our badly beaten Seagate Barracude SATA II drive. It shows pretty standard performance that’s expected especially in the Random R/W rates. Depending on your particular hard drive, the results may be higher by a few MB/s as there is always a tiny bit of variance between mechanical drives.
QuickBench Continued…
The entry level V-Series SSD is more than happy to step up and surpass the SATAII drive in the Random R/W results. When Cache is enabled, the V-Series gains another 10 to 12 MB/s on the sequential write in our test configuration. Despite the issues with the budget controller and its noticeable effect on the transfer rates, it’s still much faster than our standard SATAII platter drive.
Finally, we have the TorqX 128GB SSD and as expected, it does a phenomenal job with the Sequential Read and Write tasks. These rates are easily double and sometimes triple that of our entry level Kingston V-Series 128GB SSD drive. A bonus effect is that the TorqX happily choked down and booted up into Vista Ultimate 64-bit noticeably quicker. Anything that is physically noticeable in the computer world is a substantial gain in performance.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The benefits of SSD have definitely made them the tech to beat in terms of storage. The benefits of shaving minutes to seconds off software loads and OS installs can add up over the course of a year. If you’re a notebook user, power savings and the extra durability of an SSD are extremely helpful in cutting down on overall weight and increasing usage time thanks to the lower power consumption. Plus, the lack of moving parts creates a certain level of confidence given that the TorqX SSD can take a beating, serve special purposes in the field, and still be covered for an impressive 10 years.
When it’s all said and done, the Patriot Memory 128GB TorqX SSD is mobile and agile in every respect. Despite its capacity, it’s the fastest SSD tested on the test bench to date. In fact, the SSD offers excellent performance handling small 4K-32K data blocks and even greater performance working with the larger data blocks. This is great news as it shows Patriot is on top their TorqX product. This should please users who are serious about managing data base queries to gamers that want to install and load up their games super fast (though it won’t do anything for frame rates).
The Patriot Memory TorqX truly does offer some “Insta-RAID” goodness right out of the box without the weight or size of platter based solutions. At a street price of around $360 US for the 128GB TorqX, it is priced well within the pack and provides better than the norm performance. Factor that in with a impressive 10 Year Warranty and we find ourselves unable to offer it anything but an Editors’ Choice Award. You have got to get one of these!
Pros
- Excellent small to larger block performance
- RAID like performance from one drive
- Low noise and power consumption
- Low weight lightens up your gaming rig
- Decent mounting adapter with some design flair
- Unprecedented 10-Year Manufacturer’s Warranty!
Cons
- It’s a little on the small side (even the 256GB model)
- There’s still an SSD price premium (patience!)
Overall Rating: 9.5 / 10.0
Got a Question or Comment on this Review? Click Here to Sound Off!
Patriot Memory TorqX 128GB SATA Solid State Drive Photo Gallery
