11-Drive DRAMless SSD Round Up

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Patriot Spark

“The Spark is a perfect entry level drive for those users looking to add a boost to their system,“ said Les Henry, Patriot’s VP of Engineering. “As many companies are just now coming out with their first generation TLC SSDs, the Spark is Patriot’s second-generation TLC SSD Line.”

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The Patriot Spark ships in three capacities ranging from 128GB to 512GB. We only have the 512GB drive to test. The Spark 512GB featured a $104.99 MSRP when Patriot released it last May. The NAND shortage has increased SSD pricing dramatically, and the Spark 512GB currently sells at Amazon for $154.99. It comes with a 3-year warranty and impressive specifications. The drive can achieve up to 560/540 MB/s of sequential read/write performance. The Spark series works with Patriot's SSD Toolbox software, but you have to download it from Patriot's website.

  • Phison S11 Series Controller
  • Integrated 32MB SDRAM on controller
  • SATA3 6Gbps/SATA2 3Gbps
  • TRIM support (O/S dependent)
  • SmartZip
  • Static and dynamic wear leveling
  • Bad block management
  • Low power management
  • Operating Temperature – 0° ~ 70°C
  • Native Command Queuing (NCQ) – Up to 32 commands
  • ECC Recovery: Up to 120bits/2KB
  • MTBF: 2,000,000 hours

The other products in this review all use a quarter-length printed circuit board with two or four NAND packages. The Spark 512GB uses a three-quarter length PCB with eight NAND packages for increased parallelism. That should equate to higher performance, barring any issues with the small 32MB cache built into the Phison S11 controller.

Patriot Spark (512GB)

Reasons to buy

+
Patriot SSD Toolbox support
+
Low cost

Reasons to avoid

-
Inconsistent / Poor performance
-
Failed heavy workload test
-
No Over Provisioning

Patriot Spark (512GB)


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Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ponchato
    Look you guys need to get rid of this autoplaying, auto-resizing video or I'm done here. A tech website should not be this unusable. Skipping half a page down when I scroll slightly too far is incredibly annoying and you KNOW it irritates people and kills site usability. If it's not fixed or removed by this time next week (that's February 18th, 2017) I'm never coming to Tom's again.
    Reply
  • MCMunroe
    I agree with ponchato. Every page has this big video that plays the same damn thing that is usually the biggest image on the screen. For months it was a smaller video of Doom that played over and over, and now is a big video of cherry keys. WTF.
    Can't you just tuck in normal ads?
    Reply
  • hixbot
    Agreed. And these click bait "from the web" ads are fake news scams at best and misogynistic and offensive at worst.
    Reply
  • JimmiG
    I have a WD Green 240 GB SSD (DRAM less Marvell 88SS1074 and TLC) as a Steam games drive. It works fine for that purpose, since it's mostly sequential/random reads and very few writes (only when a game updates). No reason to not get one for that purpose, even as an "enthusiast". However, I wouldn't use them as system drives. I'm using a Samsung 850 Evo for that.
    Reply
  • Mindrax
    Use uBlock or Adblock to prevent that.
    :)
    I can't believe you don't already.
    Internet is a horrible place without blockers.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Gosh, I'm getting so paranoid about these ads that I wasn't even sure if the

    Was this helpful?
    Tom's needs your feedbackbanner was legit. Seems to be.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Thanks for the tests, Chris (and the correction, Jon).

    Some of these SSD definitely need to come with a warning label!
    Reply
  • jakjawagon
    You guys need to fix your UK website. Half the graphs are missing. Posting this here as well because it's more likely to be seen.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    19284248 said:
    You guys need to fix your UK website. Half the graphs are missing. Posting this here as well because it's more likely to be seen.
    On some articles, with pages that have lots of graphs, occasionally not all of them load for me. I'd say try restarting your web browser or use a different one & see if that makes a difference.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    Firefox + Noscript + Adblock + Hosts file from www.winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

    Stop complaining and just block them.

    I literally see 0 ads on Toms when I use the above with Firefox.

    The host file i would say is the most important.

    Even when I open Chrome 90% of the ads are gone, including the super annoying Doom video some guy was posting about yesterday. I literally had to go to another computer that didn't have the custom host file to see it. lol

    I don't have adblock nor noscript with chrome so the hosts file alone is blocking those ads.
    Reply