Patriot's Torqx 2 solid state drive can not impress in our testing. Its performance is about on par with that of a typical high-performance harddrive - far away from other common SSDs today. Why is performance so low? First of all, Patriot has chosen to use a flash controller made by Phison which does not seem to be capable of competing with controllers like Marvell or SandForce. Second, Patriot has populated only half of the controller's channels with flash memory. The drive uses eight flash chips instead of a possible maximum configuration of 16. This move alone, probably for cost, has a significant effect on performance because the number of flash channels is reduced by half. I could imagine there being quite a performance improvement from a Torqx 2 that uses 16 chips with 8 GB capacity.
The Patriot Torqx 2 has something going for it and that's its non-mechanical zero noise design which could make this product attractive for use in a media PC system, or quiet office PC. Another use could be in industrial applications that suffer from vibration where physical spinning drives would not last long. However, with a price of $225 at this time for the 128 GB variant, the drive is just too expensive to be able to find a niche for itself. If it were priced at $199, to achieve a solid-state price per GB leadership it could become interesting for specific applications.