Patriot WildFire SSD Review - PAGE 1

Like other memory manufacturers, Patriot has expanded into the SSD market over the last few years and to date they have released multiple drives and utilized various controllers. The WildFire SSD though differs from all other drives released thus far, by being Patriot's first to utilize SATA 6Gb/s technology. Along with the SATA 6Gb/s interface, the WildFire utilizes the latest Sandforce SF-2281 controller which allows the drive to support incredibly fast read and write speeds of 555MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively. In addition, the WildFire has a max random write performance rating of 85,000 IOPS, which is very impressive for any SSD, and should put it line with the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drive.

The WildFire is a consumer grade SSD that offers enterprise-class performance. This is achieved largely through the SandForce controller, but ultimately the performance of an SSD is also determined by what type of NAND it has. To this end, Patriot has decided to use sixteen 32nm Toshiba NAND flash memory modules capable of 133 megatransfers/second and utilizing an asynchronous design. This toggle mode design requires no clock signal and instead uses a bi-directional DQS to generate input/output signals using the rising and falling edge of the write erase signal.

32nm NAND is more expensive than its 25nm counterpart, and since the SF-2281 controller is new to the market, the 120GB WildFire currently has an MSRP of $279, with many e-tailers artificially inflating the price upwards of $309. Currently the Wildfire is available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB storage capacities. We are going to be reviewing the 120GB model, but since this SSD is driven by the SandForce controller there should be no performance difference between this model and those with larger storage capacities.