Introduction

Patriot has over 25 years of experience in the field of DRAM and flash memory. Being headquartered in the United States, they promise leading quality without compromise for quality.

Today, we have for review their Patriot P200 SSD in the 1 TB variant, which uses a 2.5" SATA form factor. Patriot is marketing the P200 as a cost-effective solution for consumers and upgraders alike. Under the hood, the P200 uses a Silicon Motion SM2285 controller and Intel TLC flash chips. An important cost optimization is that the Patriot P200 doesn't come with a dedicated DRAM chip. Including a DRAM chip adds a few dollars to the design cost, so manufacturers have always looked for ways to get rid of it. The big challenge for DRAM-less designs is that the DRAM chip usually caches the mapping tables, which tell the controller where to find the data. Without it, a portion of the flash memory has to be used for that task, which is much slower. We'll take a detailed look at that in this review.

Patriot's P200 is available in capacities of 256 GB ($31), 512 GB ($52), 1 TB ($90), and 2 TB ($200). Endurance for these models is set to 160 TBW, 320 TBW, 640 TBW, and 1000 TBW respectively.