Packaging and Initial Impressions

The Patriot drive box is a rather professional affair, with its plain black box and generic fonts used upon its underside. Not that this is a bad thing, one would just have expected an image or some more eye-catching designs etched upon its surface. However this is starkly contrasted by the two-toned orange fonts, with the model number emblazoned on the front. This does indeed help to liven up the overall generic impressions of the box.

Box Front

Box Side Angle

Box Rear

The inner carton is much the same as any that would be found in various computer component packaging. With the product in question being a Solid State drive, the inner carton is adequate enough to product the drive. However if this was a regular hard drive it wouldn’t be enough to protect the product.

Inner Carton

After opening the inner carton we come to the Patriot drive itself; sporting a rather interesting silver-grey colour. Examining the drive for build quality, initial impressions are excellent! The drive, though thin (as all SSD drives are), is solidly built with the SATA and power connector pins being rigid, so in theory this drive should take some rough handling. Just like the box, the label on the drive itself is a professional one sporting the make, size and model of the drive.  You cannot see it straight away but there is an iridescent effect to the drive label and this is more noticeable under a strong light or a camera flash. The label then seems to explode into a myriad of colours.

PS-100 Angle 1

Drive Label Under Normal Light

Drive Label Under a Flash Light

Rear of the Patriot Drive

Sata and Power Connectors

Now we start to go further into this drives working. Upon reading Patriot’s forums it has been discovered that this drive uses the ‘Phison Controller card! This reviewer did not have the heart to open up the drives innards on this occasion and the following images are credited to:

(http://www.servethehome.com/?p=206 last accessed 1/2/2010)

Phison Card

Phison Chip

The controller card has 64MB of cache on-board from Hynix, which in theory should help to eliminate stuttering. This was an issue with the old J-Micron controllers. In all honesty we have never encountered a Phison controller card, so it is with some excitement that we wish to find out more!  Having stated that we did not wish to open the drive on this occasion, we had a look through the web, searching for much needed answers.

Digging further into the Phison Controller chip specifications (placed upon the Phison site) we can glean the following.

PHISON’s PS3016-P7 CF/IDE-to-Flash micro-controller specially designed for CF card, IDE / PATA/SATA SSD, IDE module and embedded NAND applications. It can support 30/40/50+ nm MLC/SLC Large-Block NAND flash memory up to 32 chip enable capacity.

Fabricated in 0.16um CMOS process
Available in 128-pin TQFP/LQFP package and BGA
Operating Voltage: 2.7~5.5V
Built-in Regulator that supports 3.3V/1.8V Flash I/O

(www.phison.com last accessed on the 1/02/2010)

Next on the agenda is the testing to see if Patriot’s numbers add up to what they claim.