Patriot Warp v2 128GB SSD Review

Extended Runtime Testing

Where these units are marketed towards the home environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random reads and writes of various sizes. To test how robust this unit is, and how well it can take handle a marathon stress test, the Warp V2 was subjected to a 20hr torture session. During this time IOMeter was setup to run for 20 hours using various size tests all with completely random read/write scenarios.

This drive did get warm during these tests and at its worst was clocking in at about 9 degrees above ambient. These are still really good numbers and it does show that the all metal construction of the outer shell does help it dump its thermal load quite well.


Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

It really is not all that hard to make the Warp v2 stutter….of course, it wasn’t all that easy either. Copy a couple of large files to itself (all at the same time), do a virus scan, watch a couple Youtube videos…etc…etc and this drive will get the proverbial hiccups. To reduce these problems we first turned off Indexing, PreFetch / SuperFetch, short file names, disabled timestamp for last access of files, re enabled write caching on the disk, moved the page file to another drive, and couple of other minor tweaks. This certainly made it harder to induce stuttering and unless you really, really want it to it probably will be enough for most users. However, stuttering did occasionally still happen.

In order to really get rid of it we had to get out the big guns and aligned the partition for optimized 4k sector allocation with a 128 sector offset. This was accomplished via Diskpar and if you are interested in doing this major tweak there is a great guide floating around on an certain forum which we can PM you if you so wish. If you are running Vista you can actually use the Recovery Disk to accomplish this (with Diskpar) but we did it the old fashioned way of setting the system up to temporarily use another drive as the OS drive and has this Drive as the Slave; followed by doing an old fashioned fresh install (without destroying the partition!). Doing this resulted in a darn near stutter free environment, which was bloody quick.

Value (Cost per GB)

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review.


When compared to spindle based storage drives the Warp V2 is not exactly a great value. It’s not terrible as it wasn't all that long ago that $2 to $3 per GB for high performance drives was normal. Where this drive shines is when we compare it against other SSDs. This to us is a fairer comparison and boy does the Patriot Warp v2 kick some major butt here! It is literally less than half the cost per GB of the X-25M, that tells us a lot about who this drive is aimed at which is the enthusiast crowd who just cannot justify the cost of the X-25M but want something that can kick out some great performance numbers.