Standalone Tests
Right out of the gate this drive begins outperforming mechanical HDD’s. What you can see in the numbers on this first benchmark is that Patriot’s Warp V2 SSD transfer speeds well surpass the higher priced (albeit far more capacious) WD Velociraptor high performance HDD. The largely insignificant 0.2 ms access time showcases one of SSD’s greatest advantages over slower mechanical disks, the fastest of which here gives an almost incomparable average access time of 6.9 ms. The only place where SSD technology will not surpass mechanical disk drives is in burst rate measurements, in which SSD’s will show transfer rates only slightly higher than their sustained transfer rates.
What you cannot see in these presented numbers is the nature of each drive’s performance over the course of the benchmark. Below you will see HDTune’s graph of transfer rates and access times over time across all the drive’s storage banks for the Patriot Warp V2 SSD and a generic mechanical HDD (Seagate 7200.11 300gb).
What you can see is that a mechanical disk drive’s transfer rates decrease over time (across the disk) and access times increase over time. This means that the further away on the platters the data is located from the position of the drive’s arms the slower the transfer rate will be and the higher the access time will be. The inverse of this rule results in the mechanical drive’s faster burst rates. However, SSD’s use flash memory arrays instead of spinning platters; this results in uniform transfer rates and access times no matter where the data is located, which is by far SSD technology’s greatest advantage over traditional mechanical drives.
This configuration will produce some interesting results that will be potentially hard to interpret. For a simple RAID 0 configuration I've taken a WD Caviar WD6400AAKS and created a 128gb RAID 0 stripe with the Patriot Warp V2 SSD, to emulate the situation of the user who wants to expand storage capacity using any given HDD they may already own. The solution works perfectly and will certainly perform better than the standalone mechanical drive, but what remains to be seen is whether the addition of a mechanical drive can aid the performance of an SSD in its lacking areas (burst speed and file read rate). The numbers produced by HDTune seem to indicate an error in its algorithm, as very little change is seen from standalone benchmarks. Average transfer rates are marginally increased, and minimum transfer rates have been bolstered, but the areas in which we may have expected to see change, namely access time and burst rate, have remained unchanged. Perhaps the benchmark is measuring only the Master drive. Because of its strange behavior this particular result can be largely discounted in our analysis
Raid 0 Tests
