Patriot PS-100 PS32GS25SSDR 2.5" 32GB SATA I/II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: It was a reasonably priced SSD, and a good value. Although SSD technology has surpassed this model, it can still be useful. For example it makes a great ReadyBoost drive.

Cons: It "bricked" after a short period of use. I set it aside for a while (my own choice), and when I came back to it much later I was able to restore function by a firmware update.

Other Thoughts: I'm a long-time IT pro, not some kid who can 5-star himself. My expertise, tools and spare hardware made it easier for me to dismiss the drive as bad in the first place, and get it back later on.

Unfortunately this SSD had a firmware flaw that later versions cured. If you paid top dollar for one of these, and think it's a lost cause, think about putting it back into service. The flash update is something that anyone who can burn a file to CD and follow instructions can do.

Pros: It is an ssd. Fast read speed.

Cons: It was a slow write, hooked up via sata3. I finally had to unplug it and replace it because it simply wasn't big enough to hold my operating system. A fresh install after 3 hours of troubleshooting, running commands from the command prompt via the bios, and finally using the Ultimate Boot CD to format the disk when the windows cd couldn't do it. The machine simply crashed, and shut off my computer. When I turned it back on it simply told me "operating system missing."

Other Thoughts: I was planning on using it still. After installing my os onto a new drive, I was going to move the page file onto it for easy and fast read access. Unfortunately, when I unplugged the sata connector, the piece of plastic that borders the pins on the drive ripped right off! I had to pry the plastic out of the pin with a utility knife. I cannot believe the shoddy craftsmanship of the drive. It fails out of nowhere, for no reason simply erases windows, and when it is replaced, the connector breaks off so it is unusable? No thank you. I payed nearly $100 for this drive, and am severely disappointed. The chances of me recommending any of Patriot's products, whether it's an hdd or a usb flash drive, or whatever, are incredibly slim. Beware!

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We regret to hear that you've been experiencing performance issues with your drive. To troubleshoot the issue, please don't hesitate to contact support by visiting the link below. Rest assured that we take pride in providing quality products and excellent service.

Regards,
Patriot Support

External Link(s):

open a support ticket|

Pros: None. Dreadful piece of technology that should have never been brought to market. Stay away from these drives at all costs.

Cons: Drives have terrible write speeds, stall/stutter every few seconds, won't flash to the latest firmware and one of them died after two weeks.

I owned two Torqx drives purchased from a local store in March of 2010, by February of 2011 they were both dead within a week of each other. Contacted Patriot for an RMA and they were very responsive and agreed to replace them, which took about three weeks to turn around. Unfortunately the Torqx drives I had were end-of-lined so I had the choice between the PS-100, the Zephyr and the Warp. Reading on-line reviews and forums showed that I had the choice between a piece of dross, a real piece of dross or an extreme piece of dross. I picked the lesser of the three evils. Drives showed up, sans mounting brackets, so I had to purchase two new brackets to fit them in my case. As both individual drives and as RAID 0 they were slow for writes, like, incredibly slow. Transfer from external drive of small work files was just interminable.

Other Thoughts: I pulled the PS-100 drives out of my machine to flash the latest 3.005 firmware from my laptop but neither drive will take the firmware upgrade. I thought "I'll live with it until the Vertex 3 comes back in stock at Newegg then I'll junk these dreadful SSDs and never buy Patriot again." That would be great, except one drive died precisely two weeks to the day of taking them out of the box. It won't even be recognised by any OS I have access to (Mac OS X, Windows XP/Vista/7 or Linux) or any of my disk recovery tools. The one drive is deader than a doornail. I won't be RMA'ing these drives back for a replacement as I consider them to be utter garbage. I cannot recommend or endorse Patriot drives for the foreseeable future until their entire product line is revamped.

@Patriot: Please don't post a canned "We're so sorry, please contact support" reply to any issue anybody ever raises, I'm done with being a customer of Patriot memory for the foreseeable future. Your products suck.

Pros: Built a brand new Win7 x64 system around this drive a little bit more than a year ago. (3ghz Phenom quad & 4gb DDR3) Out of the box i was getting sequential write speeds in the 190 MB/s ballpark. Win7 booted up in 30 sec flat. 5000 hours later the write speeds still held up. Sequential write speeds were around 60-80 MB/s for about the first 2500 hours, but quickly dropped off...

Cons: After around 2500 hours (6 months for me), I noticed problems with youtube videos skipping and google maps not running smoothly. I checked the SSD's performance using Crystal Disk Mark, as I had done before. Sequential write speeds had dropped to around 20-30 MB/s. Hoping this was a fluke I ignored it for a few months. At around the 5000 hour mark I tested the write speeds again, this time discovering that they had dropped down to 8-15 MB/s! Naturally I went to Patriot's site and updated the firmware to the latest version (3.005). Patriot doesn't provide an offline/bootable method to update the FW, so I had to put the drive in another PC and update the FW from within windows. No noticable performance increases resulted from the latest FW update. I RMA'd the drive back to Patriot (who were very helpful). 3 weeks later they send me a brand new drive running the latest FW. Unfortunatly this new drive had the same terrible sequential write speeds as the old drive, right out of the box.

Other Thoughts: I suppose it's possible that later firmware versions somehow sabotaged the drive's sequential write speed, at least for my hardware configuration, but I find this unlikely. Later FW versions enabled TRIM for the drive (according to Patriot) although many users are skeptical of this as there is no real way to check if TRIM is working in Win7. Read speeds were always excellent with this drive. Stability was excellent. Aside from horrible write speeds the drive has been rock solid for over 5000 hours so far. At this point I'm not going to spend anymore time trying to get another drive from Patriot. The problem is with the entire product line. Maybe it's not a problem at all, maybe this drive is suposed to have a 15 MB/s sequential write. I'm going to switch to a WD Raptor or an Intel SSD.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We regret to hear that you've been experiencing performance issues with your drive. To troubleshoot the issue, please don't hesitate to contact support by visiting the link below. Rest assured that we take pride in providing quality products and excellent service.

Regards,
Patriot Support

External Link(s):

Contact Support|

Pros: none

Cons: doesnt work out of box

Other Thoughts: Bought in March of 2009, took out of box end of Feb 2011, plugged in, hooked up, doesnt even work. DOA basically. what a process this will be to get this replaced with a working one.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Please don't hesitate to contact support@patriotmem.com to further troubleshoot the issue. If it is determined that an RMA is necessary, we'll be glad to replace your drive under warranty.

Thank You for choosing Patriot Memory!

Regards,
Patriot Support

Pros: Great boot drive, after tweaking XP for performance it would load in under a few seconds, with virtually no post-boot hang ups (note that this was with an extremely minimalistic setup [No AV, only 15 processes after complete load]). Heat and wattage were impressively low as well, although I suppose that goes without saying with SSD drives.

Cons: While the drive had an amazing boot, I found that when copying files to it, or loading files for games, it would go very quickly for a few seconds, then freeze up for a few seconds before moving quickly again, it was somewhat annoying.

Benchmarks also did not show it to be nearly as fast as advertised(although I didn't really expect it) and after about 7 months of use the drive completely crashed in the middle of an operation, corrupting my hal.dll file, and later causing every other drive in my system to fail BIOS detection if it was connected (the latter likely being a motherboard issue more than a problem with the drive).

Also, the physical hardware is rather lame, the clips don't stick, they slide extremely easily, which is somewhat annoying, especially since it's a smaller drive, so it doesn't fit into the normal slots without rails.

While trying to figure out which drive was broken, the power clip broke while trying to reconnect it, so it broke internally and externally.

Other Thoughts: Now, I don't consider it Patriot's fault for the internal problems, although the external flimsiness could've been remedied, I mostly blame the problems on the newness of SSD drive technology, while it worked there wasn't too much to complain about, other than the hanging while copying, but it didn't even come close to reaching its estimated potential.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Falkoner,

We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you. Have you tried applying our latest firmware from our website? It will increase the performance and stability of the drive. Furthermore, it will also activate trim if you are using it with Windows 7.

Thank You for choosing Patriot Memory!

Regards,
Patriot Support
Support@Patriotmem.com

External Link(s):

Firmware|

Pros: absolutely none

Cons: ran the firmware update and got a brick

Other Thoughts: what a horrible device. just before i updated the firmware on this drive, i updated the firmware on a Vertex 2 without and issues at all. when i tried updating this drive with Patriot's update tool, and yes, for the appropriate drive, it failed and resulted in a dead drive.

i'd love to return it, but since i cut out the UPC for rebate purposes, i can't.

now i'm stuck with an over-priced brick.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. To expedite the RMA for this drive, please contact support@patriotmem.com.

Thank You for choosing Patriot Memory!

Regards,
Patriot Memory Support

Pros: Good speed and is as advertised...

Cons: Did not even last 4 months before dieing... Great price but not worth the hassle.

Other Thoughts: Have been trying to get an RMA from patriot but am still waiting since Newegg says it is out of the return policy. Very disappointed and would not recommend this item or the MFG.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. To expedite the RMA for this drive, please contact support@patriotmem.com.

Thank You for choosing Patriot Memory!

Regards,
Patriot Memory Support

Pros: Fast while lasted.

Cons: The small size you might think is good for a SSD boot drive but let me warn you that this size isn't good at all especially for Windows 7 x64. Its a hassle using this thing as a boot drive. For some strange reason this things gets filled up fast for an unknown to me reason. I turned off system restore and I disabled page filing but this thing would still fill up. I went from 6gb free space to 500mb then to 0mb free space in under 1 month and I save nothing on it! I put nothing on this thing at all and it would still fill up somehow. Then that led to more problems, because when the HDD your OS is on fills up that means you can't watch videos on youtube and other places. I bought this SSD on 12/23/2009 and it died on me 12/17/2010. So that just makes things worst. Now I don't blame Patriot I think Patriot is a good name, but I believe SSD drives are fairly still a new technology and still has bugs and other problems that need to be worked on.

Other Thoughts: BTW If this thing fails on you all your data will be corrupted and gone for good. No recovering it, I tried and I was successful in getting the data back but it was all corrupted and unusable. Bye Bye months of important archived school work. :(

Pros: Interesting packaging. Was refunded full price because it is out of stock. *fist pump*

Cons: No life force included.

Other Thoughts: Bought an OCZ SSD with refund.