Patriot Wildfire 120GB Solid State Drive Review

When Patriot entered this market, they knew what they were up against and in all honestly, they showed what they had to offer a bit late, but that’s not a problem, as what they do have on show is a great combination with the SandForce SF-2281 controller and Toshiba Toogle Flash memory, they just work and give some impressive results at the same time. Obviously this rivals the competition in terms of performance and Patriot have aimed this drive specifically for that market where speed is key and by offering a reliable bundle too, it’s certainly a winner from both angles.

We always see manufacturers shouting off about the speeds that their drives can do, and for the most part the Wildfire was spot on, it’s only when it comes to different applications and the SandForce controller really does get a slight knock back here, but in terms of real world usage, you won’t be disappointed.

With performance, we do sadly have to pay the price, and it’s not an extremly attractive one at that. With the 120GB coming in at around £240, it ends up being around £70 more expensive than the likes of the Vertex 3 from OCZ, which is a real shame but does include a unique package with the Toshiba Toggle Flash memory that we don’t see in the other similar drives on the market, like the Vertex 3. The benefits of the memory used really comes down to the life span of the drive, as it’s said to offer a longer life expectancy than other memory seen in other SSDs. The inclusion of this memory also allowed for much higher write speeds that we seldom see with other drives making this one of the fastest SSDs on the market, without stepping into PCI-Express territory.

Compared to other drives on the market, it does come with a nice Patriot branded bracket for an easy and painless installation into your system, but we can’t see that added too much to the value of the drive. The only drive that we can compare it to on a performance to price perspective is the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS which offers similar performance with different internals (in terms of memory), but obviously doesn’t have as high of a life expectancy, but we can’t see many enthusiasts keeping an SSD until such a time that it will die.

Overall, Patriot have got a great drive here, that offers good competition into the SandForce market and performs extremely well in all areas including synthetic and real-world usage, with the only downside being the slightly high price tag, but as they say, if you want the best, you do have to pay for it, so be prepared to get your wallet out with this one.