Final thoughts and rating
Patriot's Pyro SSD is based on a pairing of a SandForce SF-2281 controller and affordable 25nm asynchronous NAND flash memory; an attractive combination that's becoming increasingly popular.
Expected to be priced at around the £150 mark, the 120GB drive offers almost everything a high-performance SSD should. It hooks up to a high-speed SATA 6Gbps interface, offers blistering sequential speeds of over 500MB/s, copes well at high queue depths, and delivers excellent real-world results.
Its Achilles' heel is maintaining those impressive speeds when dealing with incompressible data, and those of you who'll be working largely with pre-compressed files such as music and video may find competing drives such as Crucial's m4 to be a better fit.
Bottom line: Patriot's Pyro SSD offers tremendous SandForce performance at a tempting price, and with Corsair, OCZ and others all pushing practically-identical propositions, the cost of second-generation SandForce ownership should only get lower.
The Good
Hits speeds in excess of 500MB/s via SATA 6Gbps
Offers all the benefits of an SSD; including instant access and no noise
The Bad
Suffers a performance hit when working with incompressible data
No 2.5in to 3.5in mount included
HEXUS Rating
Patriot Pyro (120GB)
HEXUS Awards
Patriot Pyro (120GB)
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Patriot Pyro SSD is available from Dabs.com.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
