Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD Review - PAGE 1

The second generation SandForce controllers are still relatively new, but that hasn't stopped it from quickly becoming the new darling of the SSD market. Multiple manufacturers are steadily adding SF-2200 driven SSDs to their lineups, and just over the past month we have examined three new SF-2200 drives from various companies.

The success of the SandForce processors are due to their ability to maximize the throughput of the SATA 6Gbps interface with balanced read/write speeds, and deliver performance that nearly reaches the limits of the bus type. All the drives entering the market using the new processor are capable of reaching maximum read and write speeds of over 500MB/s, and also have an extremely impressive random 4k write performance of up to 85,000 IOPS. A year ago this level of performance was only achievable when using multiple drives in a RAID array, a set up that is more expensive than the average consumer could afford.

The latest drive on the market to utilize the second generation SandForce controller comes to us from Patriot, based on the SF-2281 processor and is dubbed the Pryo. This drive is able to support read speeds of up to 550MB/s, write speeds of 515MB/s, and 85,000 IOPS 4K random write performance. The Pyro is available in 240GB, 120GB and 60GB capacities, but unlike many other SandForce drives currently available, the Pyro will come aggressively priced.