Patriot announced on Wednesday that its latest family of solid state drives (SSD), the Zephyr series, was designed around the JMicron JMF612 controller, offering native Windows 7 TRIM support. Using a controller level cache of 64 MB DDR2, the new line promises "stutter-free performance" while offering read speeds of up to 240 MB/s and write speeds of up to 180 MB/s (256 GB version only).
"Our Zephyr family of SSDs offer great performance, aggressive pricing and the inherent benefit of SSD technology over antiquated hard disk drives: quicker boot times and shorter application loading times," states Les Henry, Vice President of Engineering at Patriot. "Including a Zephyr SSD in your desktop or notebook upgrade plans provides one of the best bang-for-the buck improvements you can make to your system."
Now available for purchase, the Zephyr SSDs are offered in three capacities: 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB. Although all three models provide the same 240 MB/s read speeds, the 180 GB model only offers write speeds of up to 145 MB/s--the 64 GB version writes even slower at 85 MB/s.
Newegg, CompUSA, Amazon,and other online retailers carry Patriot products, however the new drives haven't appeared as of this writing, so pricing is unknown at this point.
