Patriot Wildfire 120GB Solid State Drive Review

If we take a quick step into the eTeknix time machine and rewind about a year ago, we can see that Solid State Drives were still very expensive and that was down to one reason really, and it wasn't the fact of how much they cost to make, but more down to the lack of competition out there. We saw the likes of OCZ and a very select few companies similar to them offering expensive SSDs because they could. SandForce became the way forward and was quickly adopted by these very few companies and offered faster speeds and extra stability where needed the most. Things were good for them but still saw the general public paying more than they'd hoped originally. Things changed quite quickly when the likes of Patriot and G.Skill also decided to adopt the SandForce drive technology into their own products which means that a healthy competition was started to unfold between the different brands. Patriot have always been known for their memory based products, so SSDs seemed to be the next logical step for them and this worked hand in hand with the SandForce controller. When looking at how simple it is, Patriot wanted to build their brand in terms of Solid State Drives and what better way to do it, than with a stable, reliable product that can rival the competition on a performance and price basis. This is where the Patriot Wildfire comes into play with its Toshiba Toggle Flash memory wcome in a variety of sizes and from a plethora of manufacturer's but when we focus on what the consumer actually needs, it's all quite simple. They are after a SSD that is quick, cost effective and has the capacity that they need. For the mass market, 240GB upwards is still overkill, and the 60-96GB market isn't quite large enough, so for a company to offer 128GB capacities can only mean good things, as it offers an ample amount of space for your operating system and in most cases, for your favourite games. The packaging from the front is very simple and a pretty standard afraid, but does display the model name including capacity and informs us that the drive is SATA III. Unlike any SSD packaging that we've seen before, the Wildfire actually incorporates a panel which flaps open up to reveals the relevant dimensions and specifications of the device including information on how to install the drive into a desktop and serve machine as well as a notebook. Also included is a list of ways on contacting Patriot via email or by visiting their website. By the above panel opening up, it gives room for a windowed view of the SSD in all its glory. The rear of the box provides a brief description of the main features which includes the low power consumption, SATA III compatibility and silent operation. More information is also available on how to contact Patriot, depending on your region. Opening things up, we find a bunch of accessories that resemble very much from what we've seen with the OCZ Vertex 3. We find a mounting bracket for desktop machines with relevant screws and a "Go Lightning Fast" stick to slap on the side of your chassis if that's the kind of thing you're in to. The drive itself is a standard affair as we expect with any 2.5" based SSD. The bulk of the drive is made from a dark grey metal surface with thee Wildfire sticker in the middle which denotes exactly what capacity you have and informs you of the size and interface, in case you forgot. On the back of the drive we find the same metal surface and another large sticker, though this time we find all of the relevant serial and part numbers including the model and firmware revision details. On the side of the gun-metal grey aluminium casing, we find two mounting points for installing the drive. These are evenly spaced out for the best compatibility with your chosen installation location. The SATA data and power connectors are also situated in the usual location for complete compatibility when installing into a dock or other similar device. As stated earlier on, the drive runs on a SandForce controller, which is where we find the much talked about SF-2881 controller that is used in plenty of SSDs on the market. We also find eight Toshiba branded flash memory chips on this side. Turning things over we simply find another eight Toshiba branded flash memory chips and a few other components that make the drive tick, so to speak.. Throughout the testing of an SSD, there are many aspects to consider including the hardware that is used in conjunction. If testing a SATA III based drive, we need to make sure that our motherboard conforms to the same standards so that no discrepancies can arise. Test system: Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Intel Core i7 2600k 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC Corsair H80 Kingston V+100 128GB SSD OCZ Vertex 3 240GB Corsair HX1050W We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AS SSD ATTO CrystalDiskMark PCMark 7 PCMark Vantage The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests the program measures the time it takes to read a 1GB file to write respectively. Both the read and write speeds were both impressive and though AS SSD works with incompressible data, this can sometimes hinder results shown on SandForce driven technology due to the DuraWrite compression technology that they include and the fact that it can't use it in this test. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. ATTO is where this drive really comes alive and with marketed figures of 500MB/s write and 550MB/s read speeds, it was bang on the money and delivered for both areas. CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enable you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) CrystalDiskMark is another piece of software that can show shocking results on any drive that uses SandForce controllers, though the Wildfire still gave some impressive results, with the read speed not too far off its quoted number, and though the write speed is quite a distance from it's quoted speed, it's still quite a solid speed for most users. PCMark Vantage is the first objective hardware performance benchmark for PCs running 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops to dedicated workstations and hi-end gaming rigs. Regardless of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. PCMark Vantage is easy enough for even the most casual enthusiast to use yet supports in-depth, professional industry grade testing. PCMark is a good piece of software that allows you to compare results from one system to another. As you can see, we scored 77,047 PCMark Vantage points, which when looking back at reviews of similar drives, is quite impressive. Looking at real world tests, the Wildfire seemes to score well in all tests, with a key focus being in how it handles Windows Media Center and importing pictures to Windows Photo Gallery. This shows that the drive can cater for all aspects of usage for the mainstream user. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows for home and business use. PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 PC tests for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark test. The Lightweight test measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark test. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity tests. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware tests. One can rely on the Storage test to test SSDs and external hard drives, as well as the system drive. PCMark 7 works a bit differently and is better for comparison purposes and allows you test your own drive and use our above results to compare. 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.