Although still not mainstream, solid state drives (SSD) are slowly becoming a more practical means of storage. We've already covered Intel's impressive 80GB X25-M SSD. Now, Patriot Memory has introduced its new Extreme Performance Warp series SSD. I looked at the 128GB drive.

One of the main reasons to go with an SSD is battery life: Switching to an SSD can add crucial minutes to your operating time. (Although keep in mind that hard drives, even SSDs, are only one component in an array of power-consuming devices in your laptop -- factors such as CPU usage, the amount of installed memory, screen brightness and Wi-Fi use are more dominant power users than the average hard drive when configured in a reasonable power-saving arrangement.)

Patriot claims the Warp drive's operational power consumption is between 280 milliamps and 330mA. Compared to a fast mechanical hard drive like Western Digital's Velociraptor (Read: 675mA; Write: 675mA; Idle: 425mA; Standby: 70mA), Patriot's numbers are impressive.

The Warp doesn't really have "idle" and "standby" (there are similarities, but the stats are not exactly the same), so comparing the two as closely as possible means that the Warp uses less power (its maximum of 330mA) under worst-case conditions than the Velociraptor does just sitting around doing nothing (425mA at idle). Assuming that Warp's worst case is when reading and/or writing, it's using less than half the power that the Velociraptor does when doing the same.

But let's be honest -- not many of us are going to buy bumper stickers for our hybrids that read, "My hard drive uses half the milliamps yours does!" Power consumption is nice, but performance is still the mark of excellence. Patriot's Warp won't let you down there -- mostly.

The Warp is heavily biased toward reading: 175MB/sec. (read) compared to 100MB/sec. (write). As a result, its boot time using Windows Vista (for our light boot, with all of but a minimal set of drivers loading) was 1.1 minutes. That's faster than Intel's X25-M or Ridata's 64GB Ultra-S Plus , which both had boot times of 1.2 minutes. However, when a full set of drivers were mixed in, the Warp slowed considerably, to 1.5 minutes, which was well below the 1.3-minute mark set by Intel's X25-M (1.2 minutes) and only a second faster than Ridata's 64GB Ultra-S Plus.

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