Just recently we checked out the new G.Skill Falcon II series, which featured an updated version of the Indilinx 'Barefoot' controller which provided support for 34nm flash memory. This new SSD provided an excellent price vs. performance ratio and we found the Falcon II to be a better value option than the OCZ Agility.

Although it appears that the Falcon II is still yet to go on sale, we did estimate that pricing would start at around $360 - $370 US for the 128GB version. As it stood at the time there was just one other relatively new SSD in that price range, which came from Patriot. Available at $360 US for the 128GB version, the Patriot PS-100 is a bit of a wild card, and at the time we did not know which controller this particular SSD was using.

Many users have been getting excited about the prospect of throwing two 32GB Patriot PS-100 SSDs in RAID0 given that they cost just $95 US each. Such a setup would cost less than $200 US and although users would be limited to a capacity of just 64GB’s with sequential read/write performance of 210/150MB/s for a single drive, this did seem like the ultimate bargain.

However, as we are very well aware, sequential read/write performance is virtually meaningless and manufacturers simply quote those numbers for marketing purposes. Therefore we really wanted to see how the Patriot PS-100 performs and if it is worth getting excited about, as many already seem to be.

Still, it is worth keeping in mind that for $140 US the Intel X25-V, which claims sequential read/write performance of 170/35MB/s, costs around 47% more. Furthermore, the OCZ Vertex and Agility 30GB SSDs cost around $160 US, making them considerably more expensive. With that in mind, let’s move on to check the new Patriot PS-100 out in more detail...

Still, for most 128GB is enough to install an operating system and an extensive set of essential programs/games. Like most solid state and traditional hard drives, the Patriot PS-100 does look rather bland. However it will likely be hidden inside a computer case anyway. The drive features the typical SATA data and power connectors.

On a side note, it is worth mentioning that there is no integrated High-Speed USB 2.0 Mini-B connector featured on this drive. That said, this is something that most SSDs fail to provide. While we don't expect users to pay hundreds of dollars on these high speed SSDs to use them as portable USB hard drives, having a USB connector handy is a useful feature.

The Patriot PS-100 differs from most SSDs in the controller that it uses, as it features a Phison PS3016-S3 controller. This controller does support a 64MB cache, which should help is avoid any shuddering issues like those that plagued the JMicron controllers. However given that this is the first SSD we have seen using a Phison, we know little about how it performs, and this is something we are eager to discover.

Patriot claims that the 128GB PS-100 can achieve a maximum read speed of 210MB/s and a write speed of 150MB/s. Interestingly, all four models have the same claimed read/write performance, which is not often the case as smaller 32/64GB drives receive slightly slower ratings.

Additionally, Patriot also claims that the PS-100 has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.0 million hours. This is lower than the 1.5 million hours most MLC drives receive, though this figure is just a rough estimation from the manufacturer. Patriot also claims that the drive will withstand 1500G shock resistance.

The Patriot SSDs measure 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm and weigh just 77 grams, thanks to their slim 2.5" design, making them ideal for both desktop and laptop computers. They are said to use 5.3 watts of power when in use and 0.5 watts in standby mode. The Patriot SSDs are designed to work in RAID if you choose to purchase more than one, and they are backed by a 3-year warranty.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 920 (LGA1366) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - G.Skill Falcon II 128GB - Crucial M225 128GB - ADATA S592 128GB - Patriot PS-100 128GB - Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB - ASUS GeForce GTX 285 (1GB) - ASUS P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - Nvidia Forceware 190.38

Please note that when testing we first run each SSD through HD Tach’s full disk benchmark, which fills the drive with a single contiguous file. This test is useful as it fills all of the flash pages, which forces a block rewrite for every successive write request. This simulates the SSD degradation problem that drives without the TRIM function are likely to face.

When moving a single 6GB ISO file the Patriot PS-100 was slightly slower than the G.Skill Falcon II, which made is just 15% faster than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive. The Crucial and ADATA drives were around 52% faster than the Patriot PS-100.

When testing the G.Skill Falcon II we found that although it had very little top end performance, it was very fast when making small file writes. Could this be the same case with the Patriot PS-100?

The next copy test is based on an installed program which has many small files. As you can see, while the G.Skill Falcon II does improve here, the Patriot PS-100 does not, and in fact it becomes much slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive. The Patriot PS-100 was found to be a shocking 44% slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive, 49% slower than the G.Skill Falcon II, and almost 60% slower than the Crucial and ADATA drives.

The last copy test uses a game installation which contains numerous small and large files. The Patriot PS-100 does slightly better here despite still being the slowest drive tested. The Patriot PS-100 took 36% longer to complete this test when compared to the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive, which is a terrible result.

As you can see, the sequential access performance quoted by Patriot is accurate, though based on our copy tests you can understand why this result is almost meaningless. When looking at the CrystalDiskMark sequential performance, the Patriot PS-100 delivered the best write performance, while it also displayed very strong read performance.

As we move to our first random test, the Patriot PS-100 falls in a heap with a write result of just 4.6MB/s, making it almost 10x slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive. Despite this, the read performance is quite good, with a throughput of 115MB/s.

As the file sizes decrease the Patriot PS-100 looks even worse, with a write throughput of 200KB/s, which is 3x slower than the 600KB/s of a traditional hard drive. Even the read performance is very poor now, reaching just 4.6MB/s opposed to the 28MB/s of the G.Skill Falcon II.

The Patriot PS-100 does not appear to support NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and as such the 4K threaded performance is no better.

The AS SSD Benchmark runs many of the same tests as CrystalDiskMark 3.0, though we are using it to verify our findings. Again we see that the sequential performance of the Patriot PS-100 is very good, as the manufacturer claims.

The 4K performance on the other hand is dismal, and once again the write performance of the Patriot PS-100 is lower than that of a traditional hard drive.

Again, without NCQ support the performance of the Patriot PS-100 does not improve in the 4K threaded test.

The final AS SSD Benchmark looks at access times and here we again see a real problem with the Patriot PS-100. While the read access time of 1.1ms is very poor for an SSD, the write access time of 20.3ms is unheard of. Even our hard drive was considerably faster with a write access time of 4.2ms, while the other competing SSDs delivered results around .400ms. There is clearly something wrong with the Patriot PS-100 and we are not sure if it can be corrected through a firmware update.

The Patriot PS-100 demonstrates quite strong read performance when testing with Atto Disk Benchmark, though it does start to make out at just over 200MB/s once we reach files sizes as large as 128K. Still, this makes the Patriot PS-100 almost twice as fast as the Samsung Spinpoint F1 for this read test.

As we have seen time and time again, it is not so much the read performance that lets the Patriot PS-100 down but rather the write performance. Here the Patriot PS-100 peaks at well under 100MB/s, making it much slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive and considerably slower than the competing SSDs.

Again, when it comes to read performance the Patriot PS-100 is able to outclass the Samsung Spinpoint F1 despite being considerably slower than the competing SSDs.

However when we move to write performance the Patriot PS-100 is terrible, as it performed significantly slower than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drive. These results are a joke, as the Patriot PS-100 appears to be a broken product.

However, if you are set on picking up an SSD, we feel the more expensive Intel X25-V or OCZ Vertex SSDs are the way to go. After all, with these products users will notice a considerable difference in performance when compared to traditional hard drives, which naturally helps justify the price premium.

When testing the Patriot PS-100 we were concerned that there was something wrong with our review sample, as the performance was extremely poor as you would have seen. The write performance in particular was atrocious and it was only the somewhat meaningless sequential tests that provided us with respectful results.

Benchmarking the Patriot PS-100 was a slow procedure and benchmarks such as the AS SSD Benchmark literally took hours to complete, where as the other SSDs used for comparisons sake took just minutes. Having to run the benchmarks three times to record the averages did delay the review and it meant that some tests took nearly all day.

Of course, when writing more than 1GB of data at a little over 100KB/s opposed to 10MB/s, these tests are naturally going to take some time. Although it is possible to purchase almost two 32GB Patriot PS-100 SSDs for the price of a single OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD, we recommend purchasing the latter product. Even a single Vertex is going to provide significantly better performance than two, three of even four PS-100 SSDs.

Overall we recommend you avoid the Patriot PS-100, just as you would an SSD based on an original JMicron controller. Although the smaller capacity models may seem tempting, we strongly recommend that you restrain yourself from buying this product. That said, we will be keeping an eye on future firmware releases to see if the PS-100 can be salvaged, but do not get your hopes up.

Reviewed By Steven Walton