Question Is Patriot a good brand of SATA SSDs?

[Pimpom]

I need a 2.5-inch SATA SSD for use as a portable drive with a SATA-to-USB adapter. 120/128GB is more than enough for the purpose and, of course, the cheaper the better, but I want it to be of a reliable brand.

There are two Patriot SSD models that fit the requirement: a P210 and a P220 for the equivalent of about US$10/11 at Amazon India. Is Patriot considered a good brand for SSDs?

 

[Misgar]

They're both cheap and cheerful DRAM-less designs. I've used loads of them to replace hard disks in ancient PCs, but you need to be aware that Windows will seem "snappier" if you buy a more expensive SSD with DRAM such as a Samsung 860 or 870, or a Crucial MX500.

The other down side of 120GB drives is their transfer rates are slower than bigger drives, due to fewer parallel memory channels inside. 500GB is somewhat faster.

 

[USAFRet]

They're both cheap and cheerful DRAM-less designs. I've used loads of them to replace hard disks in ancient PCs, but you need to be aware that Windows will seem "snappier" if you buy a more expensive SSD with DRAM such as a Samsung 860 or 870, or a Crucial MX500.

The other down side of 120GB drives is their transfer rates are slower than bigger drives, due to fewer parallel memory channels inside. 500GB is somewhat faster.

As a portable/secondary USB drive, all of that does not really matter.
Especially the Windows install.

 

[Pimpom]

Thanks for the replies. Yes, I'm aware that low-capacity SSDs are generally slower than bigger ones of the same series but the difference usually isn't a lot and doesn't matter for my use case. I just want a brand and product series with a good reputation.

 

[Misgar]

As a portable/secondary USB drive, all of that does not really matter.
Especially the Windows install.

For data drives I agree, but I have used 'Windows To Go' to produce bootable USB drives and here the DRAM cache sometimes improves performance.

 

[USAFRet]

For data drives I agree, but I have used 'Windows To Go' to produce bootable USB drives and here the DRAM cache sometimes improves performance.

Well, yes.
If you're going to be booting from it as the OS drive, then of course you don't want a second rate DRAMless drive.

For the OPs stated use case, no big deal.

 

[evermorex76]

Patriot is a well-known and respected second-tier brand (meaning not one of the big advertised ones that makes their own chips or anything), yes.

Unless you really need it to be in an enclosure where you can take it out sometimes, you might be better off price-wise just getting a pre-built external SSD. It may only be a dollar or two difference but that's a relatively large amount. Also note that an NVMe drive and enclosure in that capacity wouldn't really be much more expensive (in US pricing anyway) and will blow it away in performance, though you don't seem concerned about that.

The P220 is rated for much better performance, and so since you're already looking at the lower, slower capacity, you might consider it worth a slightly higher price to get the better model in that capacity. Note that they are both QLC, so if you're writing more than 32GB in one blast to a blank drive, you will see a HUMONGOUS drop in speed after that point. As you fill the drive, the amount that you can write at full speed will reduce as well. The pseudo-SLC cache depends on free space on the drive, so you won't want to fill that drive more than half full otherwise you may as well be using a good plain old USB thumb drive.

 

[evermorex76]

If you're going to be booting from it as the OS drive, then of course you don't want a second rate DRAMless drive.

Depends on your needs. An Orico DRAM-less drive works fine for my laptop, as did the original crummy Samsung drive (for boot time anyway). Not everybody needs 5 second boot times, and modern DRAM-less drives really are quite good for pretty much all normal usage. Nobody misses the 64MB of RAM used for the cache, and most people are doing far more reading than writing, or aren't writing with such intensity that a few percent of difference is noticeable.