The solid state drive is the data storage solution of the future. In their best implementations they provide lighting fast random access times and higher sustained read/write rates than any hard disk drive. They don’t make noise, heat up, or degrade due to moving parts like their mechanical counterparts. Solid state drives are theoretically smaller, cooler, quieter and more reliable than the mechanical disks that have been bogging down our systems and annoying us with that high pitched whine for countless years.
But the NAND flash memory used in SSD’s is expensive compared to traditional storage disks, and the controller chips for an SSD’s SATA interface are in many cases immature at best. In other words, you won’t be finding SSD’s in 1 TB flavors any time soon, and putting enough SSD’s in a RAID 0 array to match the storage capacity of your cheap old Seagate 7200.11 drives will probably have you taking out one of those sub-prime loans everyone’s been talking about. SSD’s can be found on the cheap, but if it looks “too good to be true”, it probably is; many early revision and cheap brand SSD’s employ controller chips whose write speeds drag effectively crippling the drive and may begin to slow up and fail after sustained usage.
So the SSD market can be reduced to a search for reliable drives with reasonable storage capacity that won’t break the bank.
Enter Patriot Memory and the Warp V2 solid state drive. It comes in 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB flavors at reasonable prices of $149, $229, and $369 respectively, designed to compete with OCZ’s slightly higher priced ‘Core’ series. Much like the ‘Core’ series, the ‘Warp’ series went through an ugly V1 stage that performed poorly. The Warp series’ 2nd iteration promises improved reliable performance like 175 MB/s sustained reads, 100 MB/s sustained writes, and access times <1ms. In this review, I’ll put these claims to the test and assess the performance of this drive both as a standalone and in a RAID 0 configuration with the beefier Caviar 640 GB from Western Digital to see what kind of performance this increased capacity configuration will yield.
