Patriot SSDs, Flash, and Large Memory Applications

Patriot has been supplying memory products for some time now, and they had the usual assortment of SSDs, RAM, USB, and other Flash products on display in their suite. We’ve tested many of their SSDs already—or at least similar products with the same controller—and besides the numerous SandForce equipped SSDs they also had an SSD with a Phison controller. The Phison-based products will constitute the Magma line, with 64/128/256GB capacities available and SATA 6Gbps support. We’ll be interested in testing their Magma solutions and seeing how the controller competes with other solutions; Patriot’s goal is to deliver performance that’s competitive with other midrange SSD solutions, with the intention of delivering such SSDs at more affordable price points. With a new controller and firmware to develop and debug (relative to existing solutions), the launch target is currently Q2’2012.

Patriot also had a couple SNB-E systems running to demonstrate large memory applications. With quad-channel memory and eight DIMM slots, Patriot had two systems available, one with 32GB (8x4GB) and one with 64GB (8x8GB). This is obviously a solution targeted more at workstation users, and as a demo of what sort of work would require that much system RAM Patriot had a Photoshop plug-in that stitched together 90 500-600MB TIF images into a single huge panoramic video. The final output of the tool is a 26Kx9K 1.80GB image, and the amount of system RAM has a dramatic impact on performance. The project loads in around 21 seconds with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of RAM (largely bottlenecked by the SSD storage performance), but it requires over twice as long (54 seconds) with 8GB RAM. The entire process takes under one minute with 64GB, just under 3 minutes with 32GB RAM, 6.5 minutes with 16GB RAM, and 8.5 minutes with 8GB RAM.