Manufacturer: Patriot Price: $ 225 US Author: Steve Date: 05/18/2011

[ Introduction ]

Today we are checking out a new Patriot SSD (Solid-State Drive) that goes by the name Torqx 2. This new product is designed to provide users with a cost effective SSD using a Phison controller. Already the Patriot Torqx 2 is one of the cheapest SSDs money can buy and we are going to find out if you should pull the trigger on this new product... There are plenty of players in the Solid-State Disk market today and many of them have deep roots in the memory module industry, one such company is Patriot. Although their range of SSDs is not as extensive as some of their competition, Patriot does utilize a number of different controller architectures. Back in January of 2010 they were one of the first to release an SSD using the “Phison PS3016-S3” controller, which was designed as a cost effective alternative to the Indilinx Barefoot and other controllers at the time. Fetching roughly $2.80 per gigabyte, the Patriot PS-100 was considered to be rather cheap by SSD standards, as more high-end products were priced at $3.40 per gigabyte. Since then SSD pricing has improved as todays flagship products, such as the OCZ Vertex 3, costs $2.50 per gigabyte (120GB version). Phison has now released a new controller known as the “PS3105-S5” and Patriot has developed a new series to take advantage of it. Known as the Torqx 2 this new series is again designed to make SSD technology slightly more affordable. The 128GB version which we have for review costs just $1.75 per gigabyte, making it quite a bit cheaper than the Vertex 3 and Intel SSD 510 series. However while pricing is important, so too is performance, and this is one area where the Patriot PS-100 really failed to impress. In fact the performance of the PS-100 was so poor at release that we felt our readers were better off sticking with their mechanical hard drives. Although the sequential read/write performance was quite good, almost matching the claimed 210–150MB/s, the random 4K performance was shocking to say the least. Although large single file transfer performance was acceptable, the PS-100 tanked in our game and program tests, providing considerably less performance than a conventional HDD. Therefore while the Patriot Torqx 2 does appear to be an affordable SSD, we will be monitoring its performance closely to determine whether it does in fact deserve to be called an SSD at all.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Patriot Torqx 2 in Detail How We Test, System Specs Benchmarks: File Copy Test Benchmarks: Real-World Applications Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: AS SSD Benchmark Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Benchmarks: HD Tune Pro Conclusion Next Page ->

lokkie

Posted on: 05/19/2011 07:09 AM mmm the performance is pretty poor, think I will avoid it.

ProX	Posted on: 05/19/2011 10:26 AM Not bad value, they are getting cheaper. But I have to agree Steve the m4 seems to be much better value.

Sprawl

Posted on: 05/19/2011 10:30 AM They need to make a cheap SATA3 version. Thanks for the review though it got me up to speed.

Tio Pepe

Posted on: 05/29/2011 02:44 PM Still ridiculously expensive. They just don't want to lower the price because people are impatient enough to buy today for what it is asked from them. I suspect that manufacturing them is much cheaper than that required to build the now classic HDD's.