Patriot Memory Announces Zephyr Series Solid State Drives
 

Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash and computer technology, today announced the addition of the Zephyr series to its family of solid-state-drives (SSDs). The Zephyr series of SSD offer improved system responsiveness with quicker boot times and shorter application loading times over traditional hard disk drive storage solutions.

Patriot’s Zephyr series, available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, is designed around the latest generation controller from JMicron: JMF612. With a controller level cache of 64MB DDR2, the Zephyr series provide stutter-free performance and offer speeds of up to 240MB/s Read and 180MB/s Write. To maintain performance integrity over the life of the drive, the Zephyr series SSDs include native support for the TRIM command in Microsoft Windows 7.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/10-04-14/56a_thm.gif

“As solid-state drive technology advances, it is becoming more affordable, allowing SSD solutions to reach an increasing segment of end users. Patriot’s objective is to offer the latest technology in our solutions which provide the best performance and price options”, states Les Henry, Vice President of Engineering at Patriot. “Our Zephyr family of SSDs offer great performance, aggressive pricing and the inherent benefit of SSD technology over antiquated hard disk drives: quicker boot times and shorter application loading times. Including a Zephyr SSD in your desktop or notebook upgrade plans provides one of the best bang-for-the buck improvements you can make to your system.”

The Zephyr family of SSDs are durable and reliable, with an aluminum housing to minimize typical wear and tear and with NAND memory at their core, there are no moving parts to fail, or be damaged from daily use in portable computing solutions. Additionally, the Zephyr family of SSDs provide incredible performance, reliability and a 3-year warranty.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/10-04-15/56b_thm.jpg

I Expect these to be lower in price compared to their Vertex and perhaps Agility series, based solely on the performance of the controller and the read write speeds. Also, which controller is it (the new one) that doesn't need cache anymore?

Sandforce ?

It's using 64MB cache if you read closely... I'm really looking forward to these drives.
Patriot is known to make some whoop ass fast USB drives and they also tend to provide almost legendary lifetime warranty (that usually means 10 years but hey, others offer only 2-3 years warranty). And since they will be using JMicron, they won't cost and arm and a leg...

EDIT:
I see they only provide 3 year warranty. Bummer. I hope they'll be cheaper because of this as well. I might finally be getting one 256GB for my netbook. If the price is 200 EUR or below (not likely)...

No? :D Jmicron!

you know, that Jmicron controlled SSDs, CAN lag in the OS, if the SSD is the OS drive...Indillinx,Sandforce, Intel and i believe Samsung controlled SSDs are doing better at this... also, the Indilinx controller should be a little cheaper than the Jmicron, from what i know... i guess, for under 200 euro for a 256GB SSD, one couldnt argue, but i would preferabily use it as a secondary drive, only for data, games and such.
A 64 GB SSD is fairly enough for an OS drive, if you ask me. :)
also, you will write trash that thing badly, if you dont use a ramdrive,or fast SD card,or USB stick,for swapfile and temp/cache data, and its the only drive built in your netbook. that probably wont be too healthy for it, after a few years:o

Kingston V-Series is using JMicron controler with specially modified firmware (by Toshiba) and it doesn't have any lagging issues like the first JMicron drives. Plus these have 64MB of main cache just like Intel drives. I don't think there should be any problems with it.

i sure hope these are cheaper than most ssd

FIH_the_Don uses such an SSD as OS drive, and he claims, that it still lags, but it seems to be more tolerable now. lagging has still didnt vanished completly tho. All Indilinx Drives should also have 64mb cache, the Sandforce has no cache, but doesnt seem to need one, which extends the lifetime of the drive:D

I'm gonna wait till this issue is ironed out of SDDs before I get one. By that time they should be cheaper / GB too.

After AnandTech uncovered the whole random read/write mess I just don't trust anything with a JMicron controller in it, though. I'm quite happy with the speedy and reliable operation of my Intel X25-V drive. :)