I bought this drive based on price and benchmark numbers. Unfortunately there is much more to SSD drives than their read and write speed specs - which are very misleading.
I elected to perform an image copy upgrade to this drive using a USB->SATA dock and Apricorn's EZ-Gig software. Installation and setup were very easy. Imaging the drive was a piece of cake, and the whole process to transfer my 80GB WD HDD took about 40 minutes. I then installed the Patriot into my Dell Latitude D630 and fired it up.
First boot time was very impressive, and the applications popped off of the screen almost instantaneously. Everything was incredibly fast. Reading, writing, everything. It was an amazing difference. But keep reading.
After about 10 hours of fairly heavy use, I decided to install a couple of applications to measure the disk throughput. I never made it that far. As I was downloading one of the applications, my whole system essentially ground to a halt. The disk light was on solid, and everything was moving as through the old HDD were thrashing. Only this was even worse. The first time it occurred the system took about 30 seconds to recover. Then it happened again on the second download. I decided to restart Windows in case something was up with the OS. The shutdown of Windows took 5 minutes. No joke. Much worse than my HDD.
The next boot was fast until I go to the signon screen. Once I entered my user name and password, the disk light basically stayed on solid for about 10 minutes as the system painfully came to life. I was not happy.
I decided to go over to the Patriot site, look in the forums and try to find help there.
The forums were full of this exact story. In some cases it took days or weeks to manifest. But manifest it did. There were all kinds of helpful suggestions for registry tweaks, cache settings, disabling the page file, waving a dead chicken over the keyboard - you name it. None of this nonsense should be necessary. And it isn't. Even though A well-engineered SSD exhibits some write degradation after all of the pages have data in them, it will still outperform an HDD. Not the case with the Patriot.
Long story short, these drives and all drives built on the same SSD controller chipset have the same fatal engineering flaw that causes their write performance to degrade to about 1-2% the speed of an HDD once all of the pages have been written to. Since it's a wear leveling drive, that does not take long. About 10 hours in my case. Also, this drive has no write cache, so you are stuck with the problem any time Windows decides to flush the OS cache. Ouch. After reading some of the technical links on the Patriot forum, I was much better educated on how these drives work. It turns out Intel, Samsung and a few others have drives that do not have this problem.
Spend the extra few bucks and get the Intel X25-m drive instead. That's what I ended up doing - and I have been very happy with it since. Hopefully this review will save you the trouble I encountered. Don't be suckered into all of the silly tweaking just because you know it must be possible to get that initial fast performance back. You can't. Just buy a better drive. |
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