Patriot has been in the memory game for a long time, and has been using NAND for USB flash drives for almost as long. It makes sense that they too would be building Solid State Drives for desktop and laptops. Patriot offers four product lines of SATA 6Gbps all based on the SandForce 2200 family controller: Wildfire, Pyro SE, Pyro and Mac XT. The Wildfire offers 120-480GB models while the other 3 product lines each offer a 60-240 GB option. The difference between them performance wise is very small, with the Wildfire being the exception (having lower read and write speeds than the other drives with the Pyro SE topping out the performance charts based on paper specs, by 5 MBps.
On the test bench today will be the Patriot Pyro SE 240GB SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive. With reads up to 550 MBps, writes at 520 MBps and up to 85K IOPS, the Pyro SE looks to be a crowd pleaser. First lets take a look at Patriot themselves.
About Patriot
Located in Fremont, California Patriot opened its doors in 1985. Their focus on Memory Modules and Flash based devices has remain unchanged, unlike other companies that have opened their arms to rebadged Computer cases, power supplies and CPU coolers, Patriot has stuck to what they know best. Memory and Memory related products. The few non-memory devices they have branded with the Patriot name include, memory module coolers, and storage devices (internal and external) that compliment their own storage products.
Patriot has long been known among the PC enthusiast community for their memory modules. Their customer service is excellent and further help beyond their CSRs can be had for free at their community forums.
Without further ado, the Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
