Patriot SSD?

[Lazn_Work]

Fry's has the 32GB Patriot SSD on sale for $69 AR ($89 +$20 MIR) and at that price I am tempted..

I am fairly sure these are the JMicron based ones, so I guess the question is if the stuttering issue has been addressed or if I should just skip this and be happy w my old skool raptor 160?

 

[kirbyrj]

There's a way around the stuttering if you look on the OCZ forums. Basically, you run a program that makes the random writes sequential writes. It's put out by Microsoft. Takes longer to boot and shut down, but it should be a lot faster for everything else.

They had the OCZ one on sale for $49 AR at newegg, that was the reason I looked into it.

 

[Joe Average]

Was thinking about grabbing one of these myself and doing some testing to see just how "bad" the supposed stuttering is. Was using an Eee 900 the other day with a hella-slow 8GB SSD in it, obviously MLC, with ~30MB/s reads and absolutely fucking HORRID write performance as measured by CrystalDiskMark. I mean, 0.017MB/s random writes for 4KB data chunks... egads, even floppies are faster than that. Truly ironic stuff...

But I just read over all the discussion at the OCZ forums and got caught up on the newest version of SteadyState and, if I can get to Fry's this weekend I'll probably grab one of the Patriots for a week of testing then return it. Unless of course I suddenly realize "Hey, this ~170MB/s read stuff is fun..." It ain't no RAMdisk of course but but but...

Edit:

I've been looking around for a decent review of this 32GB Patriot SSD and the only one I found was this one (Google translated link so it's a bit odd with the language):

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=da|en&u=http://www.tweakup.dk/article/1545/dk/

Based on their testing and the benchmarks published, it looks like this SSD performs almost dead on with the rated specifications, so... maybe I will just have to get one and find out for myself. 140MB/s average read speed... yeah, that's quite nice.

One last thing: note the Sandra benchmark at nearly the bottom of the page. They use a Gigabyte iRAM for comparison and the Patriot is faster. But just for the sake of fairness, also note the iRAM is tethered to an SATA I controller for that testing for some reason... odd.

 

[kirbyrj]

I thought about getting one for my Thinkpad, but I ended up going with a 320GB 7200 RPM drive instead. I figure I can partion it and run WinXP, OSX, and maybe Ubuntu all off the same drive for kicks.

 

[Joe Average]

As my system partition(s) are never more than 35GB, dropping one of these Patriots in for testing should be pretty easy. I plan - if I can manage the time - to do some testing with a lot of various applications both with the SteadyState 'hack' in place and without to see if the so-called sequential write abilities of SteadyState do make a difference.

If it does help, that could be a boon to people looking for cheap SSD drives and a simple and free way to ensure you get maximum write speeds even with the low end SSD hardware.

 

[kirbyrj]

As my system partition(s) are never more than 35GB, dropping one of these Patriots in for testing should be pretty easy. I plan - if I can manage the time - to do some testing with a lot of various applications both with the SteadyState 'hack' in place and without to see if the so-called sequential write abilities of SteadyState do make a difference.

If it does help, that could be a boon to people looking for cheap SSD drives and a simple and free way to ensure you get maximum write speeds even with the low end SSD hardware.

I'd be interested to see what you come up with on that. Right now it seems like the best thing to do is wait 6 months and then check back...or at least when the 64GB drives are in the 32GB price range.

 

[jcolby]

I own the Gigabyte iRam and have used it for years as a hardware ramdisk. It can be seen as an external drive (IDE) inside of VMs whereas I have never been able to get software Ramdisks to be seen from inside of the VM.

The iRam has a hardware controller that is SATA1, which is why it is seen that way. No one knows why they used a SATA1 controller instead of SATA2 other than that is the chipset they chose.

 

[alg7_munif]

I hope this helps:

I got my 300GB Velociraptor yesterday to replace the SSD. The SSD is really fast for reading but for writing it is very slow and sometimes I can't do anything else while installing a large program, the computer would stop being responsive. Installing a large program would also take a very long time, much longer than installing it to my 1TB Samsung drive.

I really like the faster boot and load speed from the SSD so I refuse to go back to anything slower than that, that's why I ordered the Velociraptor. With the Velociraptor, I don't notice much difference in the read speed but the write speed is much much faster than the SSD. What I do notice is the annoying disk seek sound from the Velociraptor, it is much louder than my 1TB Samsung, the sound is like an old laptop harddrive.

What I also like about the SSD is the total silent operation but I guess that I could still live with the Velociraptor. I didn't return the SSD because I think that it would be the perfect drive for my Carputer project. It is fast for reading and it doesn't have any mechanical parts that can be damaged in a car. I won't be installing much program on my Carputer so the slow write speed won't matter much there.