With the included 3.5″ mounting bracket, you have the option of installing the Torqx in your laptop/netbook or securely installing it in your chassis for desktop use. Both options will use the same SATA interface on the drive.

If you intend on using the 3.5″ bracket, the mounting screws are provided. The Torqx is secured to the bracket from the bottom and the bracket slides into your chassis’ typical 3.5″ drive bay.

I compared the power consumption of the Torqx to a few other SSDs and a conventional 500GB Seagate hard drive. With no surprise, the SSDs are a few watts below the conventional hard drive. It also appears that the Indilinx controller requires a few more watts than the original JMicron controller but the Torqx shows no difference between the OCZ and G.Skill Indilinx based drives.

I will be testing the patriot memory torqxon my test bed as the primary drive with the OS installed on it. Here’s my system specification:

Control

• CPU: Intel C2D Q6600 (G0 SLACR L731B434) @ 2.71 GHz

• MB: Asus P5E3-Dlx Wifi-AP Edition
• GPU: Sapphire HD 4850 X2 Catalyst
• RAM: Aeneon 2×2GB XTune DDR3-1600 (AXH860UD20-16H) @ 1800 MHz 10-10-10-30 1T
• PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W
• CPU Cooling: Thermalright HR-01 w/ 120mm Antec Tri-Cool Fan
• PWM/NB/SB Cooling: Stock/Stock/Stock
• OS: Windows Vista x64

Hard Drives

• Patriot Memory 64GB Torqx SSD (PFZ64GS25SSDR)

• OCZ 30GB Vertex SSD (OCZSSD2-1VTX30G)
• G.Skill 64GB Falcon (FM-25S2S-64GBF1)
• G.Skill FM-25S2S-64GB
• Seagate Barracuda SATA 500GB 7200.11 (ST3500320AS)

To test out the drive we’ll be using DiskBench, Crystal DiskMark, SiSoft Sandra, HD Tune 3.10, ATTO, HDTach, IOMeter and Boot Timer. All benchmarks were executed 5 times and the average result was recorded. The system was reset between each benchmark.

To add a little flavour to the review, I’m going to benchmark the Patriot Memory Torqx twice – once when the drive has only Windows Vista and the benchmarking software installed, denoted “New” in the benchmarks, and once when the drive is completely full with files then deleted to make room for the benchmark test files. These results will be denoted “Full”. I’m doing this to see what the performance impact is once the drive is full of files.

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