Patriot Warp v2 mini review

[F@32]

Hi folks,

I have decided to build SSD HW Raid on the cheap, so for starters I picked up two 30Gb Patriot Warp v2 and soon will hook them up to Dell PERC 5/i card (~$120). Warp v2 is similar to OCZ's Core v2. For now though I ran quick tests comparing this SSD to my mechanical WD Caviar Black 1Tb 1001FALS.

All tests were performed on P35 with ICH9 on Biostar TP35D2-A7 v5. SSD was aligned with 64K offset. WD is OS drive with WinXP 32 SP3.

Drive itself


UPDATE: Added RAID-0 Patriot Warp v2 32Gb running on ICH10R on P45 chipset. Partition offset 128 sectors or 64K, 128K stripe, 4K allocation units NTFS.

EDIT: Removed HDTune sequential tests - they fail to test SSD's especially in RAID.

Random Read


ATTO

[Oats]

I've been thinking about picking up a couple cheap SSDs to try out on my Perc5 so I can't wait to see the results.

[F@32]

I've been thinking about picking up a couple cheap SSDs to try out on my Perc5 so I can't wait to see the results.

I hear you. My PERC arrives on Tuesday-Wednesday, can't wait myself. I hope 128 sector offset and 256K stripe on these puppies together with HW RAID with cache would make them scream. But like they say "Assumption is mother of all f@ckups" Of course Apex/Vertex would be better, but they are priced 1.5-2x and performance not quite of the two Core v2's/Warp v2's...

[TimoneX]

<subscribed>

Bring it man. My 2x32GB warps have an ETA of next Friday. I'll let you iron out all the kinks. heh

Gawd I have to update my sig...that must have been 10 builds ago.

[Oats]

I just saw those drives you snagged from OCForums TimoneX, I've been watching the storage section for some to pop up for days, but I never bothered to check the misc. section. I missed out on the Core V2s somebody was selling too. I'm always too late

[TimoneX]

I just saw those drives you snagged from OCForums TimoneX, I've been watching the storage section for some to pop up for days, but I never bothered to check the misc. section. I missed out on the Core V2s somebody was selling too. I'm always too late

Sorry man. Just gotta keep yer eyes peeled. I'm very patient and just wait for the opportunities to present. There is that corsair SSD over there too. That's a good drive by all accounts.

[F@32]

Well, I got my refurbished PERC 5/i yesterday with new BBU. No go on PCIe 4x (expanded to accomodate 8x cards) P35 mobo with or without 5&6-pin mod. Board would not post. What worse, I think I bricked that mobo. Will try to save it tonight after work.

No go on P45 dual PCIe 16x slots mobo with or without 5&6-pin mod. Dropped both PCIe to 8x, put HD4870 into PCIe 16x_1 and PERC in PCIe 16x_2. No POST, but board is alive. Will try disabling on-board Marvell RAID, may be there is a conflict

Well, I will test them on ICH10R then and see how it goes...

[TimoneX]

That suxxors bro. Keep us posted. I was afeared of similar issues with my setup at the time(Giga P45) & perc 5/e but was willing to risk it for some cheap controller action when I found the adaptec for only a bit more.

Have you tried different BIOS revisions on either the P35 or P45?

[Oats]

That does suck, I was looking forward to see how they performed.

What were you using to do the pin mod? I read there were some problems with nail polish as the slot pins would cut through it. I'm using electrical tape and even then it didn't work for me at first, the tape wasn't staying put when I was installing the card. It is kind of a pita, when I had to reinstall the card later I almost just cut the pins since I was having problems with the tape again.

[F@32]

That suxxors bro. Keep us posted. I was afeared of similar issues with my setup at the time(Giga P45) & perc 5/e but was willing to risk it for some cheap controller action when I found the adaptec for only a bit more.

Have you tried different BIOS revisions on either the P35 or P45?

Didn't go as far as reflashing. P45 one has only handful of BIOS versions. I'm sending PERC back, another reason is that I can't confirm if it's SSD friendly and also read a lot of reports where it drops drives from array and people spend a lot of time rebuilding. Will be looking at Adaptec next.

That does suck, I was looking forward to see how they performed.

What were you using to do the pin mod? I read there were some problems with nail polish as the slot pins would cut through it. I'm using electrical tape and even then it didn't work for me at first, the tape wasn't staying put when I was installing the card. It is kind of a pita, when I had to reinstall the card later I almost just cut the pins since I was having problems with the tape again.

I've used electrical tape and Exacto scalpel to make sure other pins are not blocked - no dice. Yeah, tape is POS - need to re-sit it every time I will bet that ICH10R will be kind to these with 128 sectors offset, 128K stripe, 4k NTFS unit allocation. Anyway, Vertex coming out soon, so I might sell these on fleabay shortly.

UPDATE1: This is not going to be easy... With RAID-0 volume enabled with SSD's on ICH10R I can't load Vista nor Vista Recovery Disk - goes through the progress bar and then blinking cursor, and then nothing... XP Install gets further right when it starts copying files, but then it fails to copy "iaStor.inf" from floppy. Plugged in and added my WD as non-RAIDed, can't get past "iaStor.inf" copy error either when rtying to install OS on it.

UPDATE2: I don't like this. Given, he's talking about nVidia 7** chipsets, but I wonder of Patriots are not supported in RAID on ICH10R either...

UPDATE3: I like this even less.

Hi,

Looking at the Adaptec website, it appears that it is not compatible with our SSDs. I would check back with them to see if they offer any drivers or fixes available soon.

http://ask.adaptec.com/index.html
Reply With Quote

Son of a biscuit...

UPDATE4: the last hope. Looks like guy at HWC (ADDED LINK) ran some Patriot benchies on ICH10R (x58), PERC 5/i and Areca-1220.

[F0rr3sTT]

Wow! That's shocking that those ssd are not compatible with some onboard controller and hw cards. Thanks for the links and the info.

I'm too much of a newb at this to understand why, but perhaps someone with experience and knowledge would care to explain this? I mean, its not like fitting the right cpu with correct chipset ... just seems anything that has sata connectors should take any sata device (I'm not saying I'd plug in an optical drive to a hw card, but u know what I mean ...). I clearly have limited knowledge.

BTW, you may already know, and it might be out of your price range, but another person here (I think lowfat) uses warps on a arc-1220.

Good luck with your setup, hope things improve.

[jcool]

I built a rig´just yesterday using 2 of those Warp V2 drives in raid 0 on a DFI P45 JR, worked like a charm. On the ICH10R I got over 300MB/s sustained read, didn't test writes tho. No stutterting either after I did a few Vista tweaks (was using vista 64) like disabling prefetch and superfetch, and indexing. It's gotta work mate, or you got a defective SSD/cable/whatever.

[ThugsRook]

Wow! That's shocking that those ssd are not compatible with some onboard controller and hw cards. Thanks for the links and the info.

I'm too much of a newb at this to understand why, but perhaps someone with experience and knowledge would care to explain this? I mean, its not like fitting the right cpu with correct chipset ... just seems anything that has sata connectors should take any sata device (I'm not saying I'd plug in an optical drive to a hw card, but u know what I mean ...). I clearly have limited knowledge.

BTW, you may already know, and it might be out of your price range, but another person here (I think lowfat) uses warps on a arc-1220.

Good luck with your setup, hope things improve.

current controllers are optimized for mechanical drives, not ssd.

improvements are coming, and coming quickly, be patient

[TimoneX]

There are a couple threads over on OCForums w/ 2xRAID0 success on ICH9/10R as well. Mine come in on Friday, I dunno if I will have time to fiddle with them till Saturday, but I will post up at some point on how they fare with the 3085.

[F@32]

Wow! That's shocking that those ssd are not compatible with some onboard controller and hw cards. Thanks for the links and the info.

I'm too much of a newb at this to understand why, but perhaps someone with experience and knowledge would care to explain this? I mean, its not like fitting the right cpu with correct chipset ... just seems anything that has sata connectors should take any sata device (I'm not saying I'd plug in an optical drive to a hw card, but u know what I mean ...). I clearly have limited knowledge.

BTW, you may already know, and it might be out of your price range, but another person here (I think lowfat) uses warps on a arc-1220.

Good luck with your setup, hope things improve.

LOL, that's lowfat's thread on Hardware Canucks I posted link hehe.

OK, we're moving along finally - but this is retarded, it's easier to assemble dual rad custom H2O system than to hook these up

Vista still doesn't want to see them when RAID enabled - I might be doing something wrong, but neither Recovery CD nor install disk can load up. But XP is up and running. Problem with XP was that I used nLited version that probably missing something else in addition to Matrix RAID. At least I have them aligned properly now. I will post very early benchies but this is on ghetto XP install - no SPs and no optimizations (indexing, reg tweaks, etc).

I'm not getting nowhere near 300MB/s, but I'm optimistic with proper OS set-up. Glad to see 200MB/s in random reads. This setup will be used for ArmA mostly - it has hundreds of square kilometers of open space so stuff is streaming constantly - I need high sequential and random reads...

Setup as in my sig, but stock CPU on TPower I45 and no XP SPs. Tomorrow will build proper nLited XPSP3 with slipstreamed drivers and take her for a spin.

HDTune Random Read,


ATTO


UPDATE1: I have IOP333 500MHz controller on its way - may be I'll be luckier with that one. It's similar to Adaptec 3405. I noticed differences between HD Tune 2.55 and 3.5. Will add 2.55 benchies, since I mostly see that version being used on-line.

UPDATE2: Duh, Vista sometimes doesn't like more than 1 stick of RAM...

[TimoneX]

Any updates?

I *JUST* got my 2xWarp drives in. Literally opened them up, plunked one on the test bench, hooked it up to the adaptec 3085, and booted. Storage manager saw it and there was no problem with initializing it. I initialized within ASM w/ read & write caches enabled. I formatted with a 1024k cluster size rather than the default 4k...not entirely sure why, but that's what I did. Ran Atto and got this:



HDTune 8MB Read:


HDTune 64MB Filesystem:


That one is impossibly high for a single drive. Clearly the 256MB buffer is confusing the software. Perty though.

I will post more results over at OCF rather than take over F@32's thread.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=596753

[lowfat]

Son of a biscuit...

UPDATE4: the last hope. Looks like guy at HWC (ADDED LINK) ran some Patriot benchies on ICH10R (x58), PERC 5/i and Areca-1220.

Those are my results

The Perc 5/i is a pain to get working on Intel chipsets. I had to reset the card a half dozen times each time resetting the cmos in order to get the card recognized. But once it did, i had 0 problems with it.

[F@32]

Any updates?

I *JUST* got my 2xWarp drives in. Literally opened them up, plunked one on the test bench, hooked it up to the adaptec 3085, and booted. Storage manager saw it and there was no problem with initializing it. I initialized within ASM w/ read & write caches enabled. I formatted with a 1024k cluster size rather than the default 4k...not entirely sure why, but that's what I did. Ran Atto and got this:

That one is impossibly high for a single drive. Clearly the 256MB buffer is confusing the software. Perty though.

I will post more results over at OCF rather than take over F@32's thread.
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=596753

Oh man, post away, I'm not attention whore and it's good to compare results.

Nice! It arrived and works. Word of caution about ghosting backed up partition - your alignment will be gone and up to 20-30% in performance. I don't remember the name, but there was probably only one tool on the market that maintains alignment. You might want to do fresh partition creation and alignment with Vista Repair. You will get very good speeds.

Yeah, I solved Vista mystery. 1 stick of RAM is gone when I bricked mobo. Never saw memtest rebooting PC before it even starts I'm running with three sticks now, and installed XP on Warps RAID-0. Pretty snappy. Going to apply OS reg tweaks and load games tomorrow.

Those are my results

The Perc 5/i is a pain to get working on Intel chipsets. I had to reset the card a half dozen times each time resetting the cmos in order to get the card recognized. But once it did, i had 0 problems with it.

Cheers mate, I recognized your user_id later. Good job on those tests. Areca is out my price range but good to know. What kind of 32gb SDDs are you running on it? Warps?

[TimoneX]

Oh man, post away, I'm not attention whore and it's good to compare results.

Nice! It arrived and works. Word of caution about ghosting backed up partition - your alignment will be gone and up to 20-30% in performance. I don't remember the name, but there was probably only one tool on the market that maintains alignment. You might want to do fresh partition creation and alignment with Vista Repair. You will get very good speeds.

Yeah, I solved Vista mystery. 1 stick of RAM is gone when I bricked mobo. Never saw memtest rebooting PC before it even starts I'm running with three sticks now, and installed XP on Warps RAID-0. Pretty snappy. Going to apply OS reg tweaks and load games tomorrow.



Cheers mate, I recognized your user_id later. Good job on those tests. Areca is out my price range but good to know. What kind of 32gb SDDs are you running on it? Warps?

This doesn't seem to be affecting WIN 7 at all. Just ran off some tests with the warps as the boot drive and performance seems unaffected at 41% full. Alot more testing to do though.

Glad you got it sorted!

[lowfat]

Cheers mate, I recognized your user_id later. Good job on those tests. Areca is out my price range but good to know. What kind of 32gb SDDs are you running on it? Warps?

Yes they were Warp V2's. The Areca wasn't all that much better anyways. Faster writes, but slower reads. I sold all the equipment this morning though, so I don't have them anymore.

[F@32]

This doesn't seem to be affecting WIN 7 at all. Just ran off some tests with the warps as the boot drive and performance seems unaffected at 41% full. Alot more testing to do though.

Glad you got it sorted!

Ah yes of course, Win 7 takes care of alignment from the get go. It sets it at 64 sectors (32K) offset I think.

Yes they were Warp V2's. The Areca wasn't all that much better anyways. Faster writes, but slower reads. I sold all the equipment this morning though, so I don't have them anymore.

So what's your storage setup in Core 7 rig now?

[TimoneX]

I will see when I do some XP64 testing early next week(I hope). With VMWare on tap I don't see any reason to ever run XP32 again. Watching my 12GBs of memory get turned into 3.25GBs would probably make my eyes water.

[F@32]

I will see when I do some XP64 testing early next week(I hope). With VMWare on tap I don't see any reason to ever run XP32 again. Watching my 12GBs of memory get turned into 3.25GBs would probably make my eyes water.

Haha I hear you, I don't use any apps that cause commit charge to go more than 2.2Gb. So right now I'm fine with XP.

[lowfat]

Ah yes of course, Win 7 takes care of alignment from the get go. It sets it at 64 sectors (32K) offset I think.



So what's your storage setup in Core 7 rig now?

A 320GB 7200.10 Thing feels like a dog compared to what I am use to. Will grab a Vertex/X25-M here soon once I see how Vertex does.

[F@32]

A 320GB 7200.10 Thing feels like a dog compared to what I am use to. Will grab a Vertex/X25-M here soon once I see how Vertex does.

Oh noes, you has some spinning noisy thingies that are so yesterday

BTW if people are curious, I have not experienced any stuttering with RAID-0 on ICH10R. I had Total War installation going with streaming internet radio and 4 tabs of firefox opened - no problems.

@ TimeoneX: Can you subjectively say that SSDs are faster on your system? Not looking at benchmarks, I honestly can't tell