Patriot Pyro SE 120GB Solid State Drive Review

When we initially saw the first Pyro drive from Patriot, we loved it as it offered a great budget drive for consumers wanting to upgrade effortlessly and painlessly. We say painless because you’ll still be left with some change at the end of it. The only real gripe was the fact that it uses asynchronous memory which can be a a bit of a pain when looking at benchmarks but for real-world usage, you still won’t notice a mass amount of difference.

The people who will notice the difference is the enthusiast who cares about comparing their components and benchmarks, which is where the original Pyro was a bit of a let-down but still a great drive none the less, especially for the price point. To combat this problem for the high-end market, Patriot released the Second Edition or SE to give a slight edge over the competition by using synchronous memory, whilst still coupled with the famous SandForce SF-2281 controller.

When looking at the difference that the improved memory gives over the original Pyro with its async memory, we can see a clear improvement and the speeds that Patriot claim with the Pyro SE are true and that’s what we like about Patriot, as they offer no frills, no lies, just truthful products that do what they say on the tin.

Also with the price of hard drives soaring into the sky, it’s the perfect time for Patriot to start releasing more products as it will certainly make their Solid State Drives look even more attractive and with a recommended retail price of £165 it’s certainly attractively priced and we can see a lot of these flying off the shelves very quickly. You can expect retailers to start stocking the Pyro SE model very soon, so keep an eye out and get a good bargain if the RRP is anything to go by.

Looking at the Pyro SE from an all-around angle, we can certainly see why they have developed it to offer slightly better performance by use of the Micron synchronous memory which boosts things quite dramatically and by keeping a low price point, it still remains a fantastic, cost-effective product which in this current climate is what the consumer really need.