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.

Packaging and Contents

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of metal to improve its durability and is only 7 mm thick, which ensures it will fit into modern notebooks.


The Patriot P200 uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will, in such a case, work at reduced performance.


On the PCB, you'll find two NAND flash chips and the controller—a DRAM chip is not installed.


The Silicon Motion SM2258 is a four-channel flash controller; the used XT variant denotes support for DRAM-less SSD designs.


The two flash chips are 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, made by Intel through their cooperation with Micron. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.

Test Setup