Patriot's P200 comes at truly impressive pricing of just $89.99 for the reviewed 1 TB version, which sets a new record for our reviews. That brings the price to only 9 cents per gigabyte, making this an excellent candidate for a large-storage, read-heavy drive for all your games, for example. Under the hood, the P200 is powered by a Silicon Motion SM2258 XT controller, which we've encountered on many other budget-oriented drives before; it has a good track record.

Averaged over all our real-life performance testing, we see the P200 a few percentage points behind the bulk of SATA drives—the fastest are around 10% faster. Top-end M.2 NVMe drives reach around 35% more performance, but come at higher cost, too. If you look at our price/performance chart, you'll see how compelling the $90 P200 really is, claiming one of the top spots. As mentioned before, the P200 does not come with a DRAM cache chip, a move that reduces cost, but also affects random write performance.

DRAM on an SSD is used as fast temporary storage for the drive's internal mapping tables, which translate between physical disk addresses (the OS sees) and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location". Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade-off. A 1 TB SSD typically uses 1 GB of DRAM, which costs a few dollars. If you can save that, you'll be able to position your drive more aggressively, leading to more sales, or you'll enjoy higher margins.

The Patriot P200 really stands out in sustained write performance. While nearly all TLC-based SSDs can write at maximum speed for only a few seconds (~16 GB aren't uncommon), the P200 aces this test without any slowdowns and delivers a sustained write rate of 420 MB/s, which is faster than even many M.2 NVMe drives. This also beats all the QLC based drives on the market, which often end up with pathetic long-term write speeds of around 200 MB/s.

We mentioned excellent pricing of the Patriot P200 Pro before. With $89, it is essentially the most-affordable 1 TB SSD on the market (and a 2 TB version exists, too). If you want cheap SSD storage then definitely consider the P200. While you probably shouldn't use it in a server or (random) write-heavy workstation, it's an excellent choice for a consumer system. QLC-based drives should end up a few bucks cheaper than the P200, but personally, I'd stay away from those for all systems seeing serious use as their write speeds are just too low. For a media PC or similar, QLC could be an option, though. If you do have a bit more money to spend, the Crucial MX500 might also be worth looking at. It's currently $110 for the 1 TB version and does feature a DRAM cache chip, unlike the P200, so random write performance will be better.