Patriot Pyro SE 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Patriot are a brand that are getting more and more recognition lately, but still not as much as we think they should. They have started to focus more on Solid State Drives opposed to memory, and this is a good move, if you have the right products in your catalogue, and simply put, Patriot do.

You may remember that we looked at the Pyro 120GB SSD from them a little while ago, and we honestly thought it was a great product that offered performance to the general consumer and at a good price point too. If you can offer a product that has great performance and is cost-effective, then you simply have a great all-round pitch.

Whilst the Pyro is a great SSD, for the enthusiast, there was a slight let-down in the fact that it uses asynchronous flash memory, which can hinder performance, mainly in benchmarks which is what an enthusiast user is focussed on, though for real-world usage, you are unlikely to see much of a difference at all, if any.

With this in mind, Patriot has released a new product onto the market, with the Pyro SE. The Pyro SE is the Second Edition, hence the name, and still has its focus on the price conscious but with a slight change. The Pyro SE has the added performance of synchronous NAND Flash memory, which allows for a whole host of new features that the SandForce SF-2281 controller can now deal with. This allows the Pyro SE to offer the very best read and write speeds of up to 550 MB/s read and up to 520 MB/s write as well as allowing TRIM support, DuraClass technology and DuraWrite technology.

With these features in mind, it allows the Pyro SE to deal much better with large file transfers whilst not skimping in other areas, apart from the price. Patriot back this product so much that they believe price shouldn’t even come into the equation due to how competative it is.