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Today’s review will examine at Patriots first entry to the SATA 3 SSD arena in the form of their just released Patriot Wildfire 120GB SATA 3 SSD.
Patriot is one of several companies introducing SATA 3 ‘SandForce Driven’ SSDs and this seems to be a very business wise decision considering the success SandForce is having as of late. ‘WildFire’ will push out industry leading read and write performance specifications in excess of 500MB/s, speeds that both the consumer and enterprise are favoring in their SSD purchases.
This review did prove to have an unexpected and very rare surprise, however, one that is going to test your powers of observation we are certain. Will you be one of the crowd on the left who finds it right off or standing right with the rest who missed it completely?
INTRODUCTION
The Patriot Wildfire SSD is available in 120, 240 and 480GB capacities and carries with it the industry standard 3 year warranty. It is a SATA 3 SSD, however, is fully backwards compatible with SATA 2 systems and its SATA 3 specifications list 555MB/s read, 520MB/s write and 85,000 IOPS at 4k random write disk access. A quick check on IOMeter brings this claim right in range. As a quick reference for new SSD enthusiasts, anytime we see both read and write transfer speeds in excess of 500MB/s and fairly close, this is a great indicator that the SSD is SandForce Driven and contains their processor within. No other company has yet to even come close to this performance and all but a few SSD manufacturers have climbed aboard the SandForce band wagon in result.
Right off, we keyed in on the great color choice of Patriot and we found the Wildfire SSD and a 2.5″ to 3.5″ conversion bracket within the package. Its great to see manufacturers starting to include the bracket as we have been stating that it should have been a standard item for some time now.
The case itself is of two piece metal alloy and held together by four small hex screws. There was no security tape present on our sample which would prevent opening and tampering with the PCB, however, we have to mention that disassembly will automatically void the warranty.
INTERIOR COMPONENTS
The Patriot WildFire 120GB SATA 3 SSD contains a SandForce SF-2281 processor and 16 modules of Toshiba 32nm Flash Memory (TH58TAG6D2FBA49) which puts this SSD right in line with the OCZ Max IOPS SSD we reviewed with same SF processor and similar Toshiba NAND.
Total RAW capacity of the Wildfire is 128GB (16×8) however, one module is utilized for SandForce firmware and over provisioning which brings this SSD to its advertised capacity of 120GB. Formatting then reduces it to 112GB available user capacity.
Pg 1 – INTRODUCTION
Pg2 – TEST PROTOCOL & INTRO TO THE ANVIL PRO BENCHMARK BETA
Pg3 – ATTO, CRYSTAL DISKMARK AND AS SSD TESTING
Pg4 – HDTUNE PRO BENCHMARKS