Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD Review

Interior Impressions

Please remember that opening any SSD will effectively void your warranty.


To open up the Torqx you have to remove four screws, and break two precautionary “warranty void” stickers. To remove the board from the case there are four more screws to be removed to completely disassemble this SSD. Once this was accomplished we took a look inside and this is what we found.


Wow, if we didn't know better we would think this was a G.Skill Falcon drive and not one with the Patriot label on it. The similarities are so many and numerous that it is well nigh impossible to distinguish this board from the Falcon. Both are built on a blue PCB and at one end you have the data and power ports with the jumper pins, then the RAM and Barefoot controller followed by your typical double row of flash chips. There is another another double row of 4 chips on the other side of the PCB. In grand total you have: 16 flash chips, one RAM chip and one Indilinx Barefoot controller chip….just like the G. Skill Falcon. Indeed, the label on the back is so darn close that except for a -12E vs. -16E at the end they even have the same interior model number of “S2SF-A28SMDCDX1”!


The I/O controller chip is of course none other than the Indilinx “Barefoot” IDX110 controller. As expected, this SSD comes with the Indilinx IDX110M00-LC (with emphasis on the LC) and not the older –FC based chip. As noted in previous reviews, the Indilinx IDX110 is an ARM based controller with native SATA 3.0Gb/s, supports capacities of up to 512GB, is rated for speeds of 230MB/Sec read and 190MB/s writes.


The memory which graces this board is made by Elpida. To be specific this single 64MB SDRAM chip is labeled as S51321CBH-6DTT-F, though the actual Elpida part number is the EDS51321CBH-M-F and is rated to run at 166MHZ at CL3 at an operating temperature range of between 20°C to 85°C. Or as is becoming a regular theme…it’s the exact same chip as we found in the Falcon and the Vertex.


The MLC NAND chips used on the Torqx are Samsung K9HCG08U1M-PCB0 modules. Once again, using the online Samsung model decoder we can see these chips are 48 pin 3bit MLC Quad Die Package, 1st gen lead free (ROHS compliant), 2.7V ~ 3.6V, 25 nanosecond NAND chips which operate with Dual nCE (Dual Chip Enable control) & Dual R/nB (Dual Ready/Busy Output). This model is rated at a density of 64Gbits or 8GB per chip and an operating temperature range of 0° to 70°C.

Above the model number we can see these were made in the 10th week of 2009 and below it we can see the batch number “CAA167X1” (or at least what we assume is the batch number but is described by Samsung vaguely as “Customer List Reference” only). However, the chips on the backside of the board were made later in the 16th week of 2009, but are the exact same model. While we prefer to see all the chips be from the same batch this is obviously not the case. However as we saw with the Vertex’s mix bag of chips, the slight differences in batches have at worst only minor impacts on performance.

After looking long and hard at all the parts, the only difference between the OCZ Vertex, the G. Skill Flacon and this Patriot Torqx….is the batch numbers on the various chips. These 3 SSDs are for all intents and purposes dead ringers for one another. As we said in the begging, choosing one may come down to more mundane things other than raw performance, and that "free" 2.5" to 3.5" converter is looking more and more like a brilliant move as time goes by.