Patriot Warp v2 128GB SSD Review

IOMETER

IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.


The X-25 is a monster when it comes to IOMeter results, and it is a shame as it does tend to flatten differences between the other drives. The Patriot Warp v2 pulls in some awfully impressive numbers, numbers which any company would be proud of to call their own. This is not an easy test and to accomplish nearly 1300 IOs per second across all the que depths is worthy of your respect. Once again we are only seeing a glimpse of what MLC NAND chips are capable of and that JM602 controller is to blame once again.

IOMeter Stutter Test

In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severly outnumber writes. However, to get a good handle on how well a Solid State Drive will handle a worse case scenario (and thus how likely the dreaded stutter issue will happen) we have also run an additional test. This test is made of 1 section at que depth of 1. In this test we ran 100% random. 100% writes of 4k size chunks of information. In the .csv file we then found the Maximum Write Response Time. This in ms is worst example of how long a given operation took to complete. We consider anything higher than 333ms (one third of a second) to be a good indicator that stuttering may happen, with the higher the number the worse the duration of the stutter will most likely be.


As we suspected, the JM602 controller may be better than its predecessors but that is not saying much. 900+ms is .9 of second….that is bad, real bad. What makes this so terrible is the fact this test is only taking place at leisurely 1que depth pace. What you should walk away with from these numbers is that this drive will usually be very fast (as a 2.21MS average write latency is better than spindle drives…sans V-Raptor) but if you are trying to copy multiple things at once (i.e. multiple writes) you are going to be hit with a big old stutter stick. This is all theoretical as this is still only a synthetic test…so let’s see how well it performs in the real world!