Patriot Memory Torqx 2 128GB SSD Review

Here is our testbed:

Motherboard: Foxconn Quantum Force Rattler P67 vP04 BIOS
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K
Case: Open Air testbed
Power Supply Unit: Club 3D CSP-X1000CB 1000 Watt
Graphics card: Club3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream Edition
Memory: OCZ Gold PC3-10600 4x2GB 1333@CL9
HDD: WD 500GB 7200RPM
Monitor: LG L246WH-BH 24"
Windows 7 x64 SP1 with latest updates installed

The "enable advanced performance" option was selected under the device's properties (OS). For the tests, we used the following software leaving their settings to defaults:

HDTachRW v3.0.1.0
HD Tune v4.50 Pro
Crystal DiskMark v3
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
ASS SSD Benchmark 1.5xxx
IOMeter v2006.07.27 with Xtreme Benchmark template
PCMark Professional edition v1.04
AIDA64 Disk Benchmark Extreme Edition
Sysoft Sandra

We start the tests with the HDTachRW software. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices. The software measures the sequential read speed (at various points on the device), the random access speed and sequential write speed.

The software reported an average sequential writing speed of 180.3 MB/s and a sequential reading of 195.9 MB/s. The results are lower than what we expected and those quoted by Patriot.

HDTach’s fixed strides between sample points causes issues. The software uses fixed strides across the array to measure small block sizes. The periodicities of the stride pattern and the flash memory address space may cause some wave-like interference patterns of the benchmark results that are also measuring artifacts rather than being indicative of performance. "

The HD Tune Pro software is also a utility we used to measure the drive's reading performance. Although not necessarily representative of real-world workloads, HD Tune's targeted tests give us a glimpse of each drive's raw capabilities.

In the a sequential read test, the drive read the data at 213.6 MB/s (average), which is again slower than we expected:

Here is another sequential file test. We used 64MB of data comprising out of sizes ranging from 0,5 KB to 8 MB. As you see in the benchmark below, the Patriot Torqx 2 SSD was faster once it passed the 128KB file size. The performance for write topped at around 212MB/s and for read close to 245MB/s:

The HD Tune Pro also allows random access read testing. Here are some more results with the software to randomly seek files of different sizes:

The 512 bytes performance of the Patriot Torqx 2 128GB was rather weak, particularly the read throughput which reached just 0.862MB/s. The 1MB performance was also relatively weak at 142.024 MB/s. Finally at the random read tests, which use random file sizes, the Patriot Torqx 2 128GB performance is quite poor.

The following test is the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark, which determines the data transfer speed of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, optical drives, and flash memory based devices. At the random read test with a 512Mb file, the 128GB Patriot Torqx 2 SSD returned a 248.1 MB/s, while the average access time was 0.58 ms.

The next software we used was the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The benchmark performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB.

This time the drive gave the expected performance an average of 225 MB/s for write and more than 265 MB/s for read , especially with files larger than 128 KB, in Queue Depth 4. These meet with the manufacturer's own specification.

Generally, ATTO is the preferred standard benchmarking software as while it runs spot data is has several advantages over other HDD benchmarks including the fact that it shows the specific speed of each file size transfer and shows a true average, this benchmarking product also doesn't seem to favor SRAM over DRAM caches.

The next benchmark is the CrystalDiskMark. The software provides throughput data based on sequential reads and writes, and random (512K/4K/4KQD32) reads and writes. We've used the default 1,000MB file-size for the tests.

Sequential tests on this Phison PS3105-S5 SSD produced a maximum read speed of 254.8 MB/s, while the write speed was 224.6 MB/s. Both results are not bad for a budget SSD.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 reported 512K results of 156.6 MB/s read and 192.6 MB/s write performance, which should be considered as weak.

4K tests produced 12.64 read and 45.30 write performance.

4KB queue depth 32 IOPS is one area where high-end SSDs excel. The 128GB Patriot Torqx 2 SSD gave a decent performance for a $225 128GB SSD.

We proceed with the AS SSD benchmark, which contains five synthetic as well as three practical tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and the random read / write performance of an SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system's cache. The Seq-test measures how long it takes to read and write an 1GB file.

The 4K benchmark tests the read and write performance for random 4K blocks. The 4K-64-THRD-test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that here the read and write operations are distributed on 64 threads.

Beginning with sequential read and write performance, the 128GB Patriot Torqx 2 SSD produced 248.45 MB/s read speed, and 211.62 MB/s write performance.

Single-threaded 4K IOPS performance delivers 9.25 MB/s read and 36.05 MB/s write, while the 64-thread 4K reads recorded 71.68 MB/s and write performance was 47.39 MB/s.

Again, all the above results are adequate for a budget SSD. In addition, although the drive showed increased access times for read (0.544 ms,) it was significantly faster during write (0.108 ms):

In the following test, the 128GB Patriot Torqx 2 SSD is reading and writing files, which have been partially of fully compressed. Reading seems to be not affected by whether the files are compressed or not, and the drive returned a solid performance of about 240 MB/s. Writing was slower than reading at about 210 MB/s and was gradually lowering as the drive was writing more compressed files: