W
e’ve had two PYRO
drives here at
TheOverclocker. The first
one didn’t impress us much.
While the performance was
significantly better than the
SSD’s of old and the price
was fair for a 240GB drive,
there were better options on
the market and in particular
the WildFire drive. So we
decided to forgo that review
when we were made aware
of an updated drive dubbed
‘PYRO SE”. We weren’t told
exactly what it was that
differed in this drive from
the first iteration but suffice
to say the performance
differences are massive.
In fact peculiar to the
performance of this drive is
that it managed to oust the
Wildfire 120GB. From what
we can see, the WildFire
240GB likely offers the
same performance as the
PYRO SE 240GB we have
here.
This brings us to another
oddity about the PYRO
SE. Currently this drive
retails for exactly the
same price as the Wildfire
drive, yet based on our
understanding the PYRO
series was supposed to
be a little more affordable
while only suffering a
small performance penalty.
Looking at the benchmarks
one can clearly see this
is not the case. The PYRO
SE was faster than the
Wildfire drive in ever y
discipline save for the PC
Mark Vantage Test. Granted
this is the test most of you
reading this care about,
however one would have
to be wear y of basing their
purchasing decision solely
on that test as we truly
believe that overall the
PYRO SE is the better drive.
When compared to a
favourite of ours, the OCZ
Vertex 3 MA X IOPS edition,
we see that our chosen
drive is faster in ever y
benchmark and moreover
it is a good $20 cheaper.
We still believe the Vertex 3
to be a great drive, but the
PYRO SE is just better in
ever y way. A surprise then
given that one can clearly
see the shortcomings of
the original PYRO drive.
There’s really no reason
to even look at the original
drive when this is available
as an alternative.
We quickly checked under
the hood of this drive and
found the tried and tested
SF-2281 controller paired
with 25nm MLC NAND chips
and obviously no cache.
So the typical setup found
in most high performance
desktop SSDs these days.
The performance however
is anything but ordinar y
and whatever tuning that
has occurred has produced
a great drive but one that
may ver y well make the
Wildfire drive irrelevant as
there’s really no reason to
go with that drive with all
things as they are. This is
easily amongst the fastest
desktop SSD’s we’ve tested
to date, beating out all our
previous favourites. On a
side note, we’d also like
to add that on the Wildfire
drives we’ve experienced
some random locking up
causing the system to
hang. A cold boot would be
needed to fix this, however
we experienced none of
that with the PYRO SE.
So it’s something worth
keeping in mind as to
date there’s not been a
firmware for the WildFire
drive that we’re aware of
that fixes this issue. The
PYROS SE is therefore ver y
easy to recommend and is
our choice of drive from
PATRIOT.
[ Neo Sibeko ]
Summary
There’s not much to
argue here, the numbers
speak for themselves.
The Price may be a little
steep for some, but
we’ve not tested another
drive of this capacity
and performance that is
cheaper. Patriot’s done a
stellar job with the PYRO
SE and this is definitely
a drive to buy if you’re
in the market for a high
performance SSD.
Would you buy it?
ry from ours. These are only used as a guide to what kind of performance you can expect on a
Read IO/s
12385.94
12151.66
11192.11
9054.37
10895.21
Write IO/s
6096.26
5976.58
5519.68
4467
5373.33
Avg. IO Response
0.4327
0.4411
0.4785
0.5914
0.4915
Max IO Response
50.5731
44.379
54.3345
467.421
54.2461
Yes most certainly,
especially with the price
that it’s retailing for over
at TigerDirect at $369.99
The Score
8/10
2012 | Issue 18 The OverClocker 23