Patriot SSD Warp 64GB

Solid State Drives (SSD) differ from regular hard drives on a number of levels but perhaps the most noticeable difference is that the former features no moving parts. Rather, SSDs rely on non-volatile flash chips to store data, which gives them tremendous speed and, as a bonus, ruggedness. On the flipside, SSD drives are quite expensive because non-volatile, high-speed memory holds a price premium.

In line with this, our Patriot SSD Warp 64Gbyte test sample costs a staggering US $228, which works out to $3.5 per gigabyte. Still, SSD drives are built for speed and on that count, we could find no faults with the Warp.

Running our HDTach3 synthetic benchmark on the drive, the Patriot returned an average read speed of 140.5Mbytes/sec. This is the highest score we've ever witnessed from a single storage drive. Moreover because the Patriot is SSD-based and thus free from moving parts, it produced a staggering random access time of just 0.2ms, which is quicker than any standard hard drive can hope to achieve.

Moving to our real world tests, the Warp continued its superlative performance. It completed our Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R level load tests in 14- and 8-seconds respectively; the quickest times we have on record. The team even noticed that the Windows boot process was noticeably shorter, which really makes this the ultimate drive for speed freaks.

Verdict: If you're looking to seriously cut read and write times and money is no object, consider this Patriot for the job.