Patriot turns the SSD dial up to 11

Although most of the industry believes that SSDs won’t be affordable for a while now, many are still keen to show us how they’re getting on with the technology.

Patriot was one such company – it showed us its latest high-performance SSD drives, which boast both impressive read and write speeds. This is something that many previous SSD drives haven’t been able to achieve.

Patriot faced a 32GB version of the drive off with a standard 2.5in drive, although it didn’t want to reveal the manufacturer whose drive it was using for the comparison. The mechanical drive hit read and write speeds in the region of 47MB/sec, while the Patriot SSD hit read speeds of close to 130MB/sec and write speeds of over 70MB/sec.

The drives come in capacities ranging from 32GB to 256GB and the company said that it expects to release the 256GB drive in July – smaller models should be out before that date. Patriot remained mum on price for the drives, but a representative of the company did say they expected solid state drives with decent performance to hit reasonable price points towards the end of 2009 when NAND prices drop further.

We’ve seen a lot of SSD technology at the show this year, and it’s starting to look a lot more mature than it has in previous years – now it’s just a case of NAND prices getting to the point where the technology—combined with good performance characteristics—is very affordable. Discuss in the forums.