Patriot Pyro SE SATA III Solid State Drive Review

Name: Patriot Pyro SE
Brand: Patriot

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, January 02, 2012, 12:00 PM EDT

Performance Summary: The Patriot Pyro SE performed very well throughout out battery of tests. Generally speaking, the drive’s overall performance fell somewhere in between the original Pyro and higher-end WildFire, which put it right on par with other SandForce-based drives in its class. With that said, the Pyro SE’s performance was much closer to the WildFire than the original Pyro, especially with workloads using incompressible data.

The Patriot Pyro SE 120GB SATA III SSD

The 120GB Patriot Pyro SE drive we’ve evaluated here is currently selling for about $205, or $1.70 per gigabyte. The higher-end Patriot WildFire, which uses more expensive Toshiba synchronous NAND flash memory, is selling for about $235, or $1.95 per gigabyte. And the original Pyro with its asynchronous NAND is about $185 or $1.55 per gigabyte for a 120GB drive. Looking back through the benchmarks, it’s easy to justify the somewhat higher price of the Pyro SE over the original model. The newer Pyro SE offers better overall performance than the original, that’s only a hair behind the pricier WildFire. If we compare the price of the Pyro SE to competing SandForce based drives from OCZ and Corsair, the Pyro SE’s price still looks decent--its slightly more expensive than Corsair's offering, but cheaper than OCZ, at least for now (prices are still constantly fluctuating in the SSD space).

Ultimately, we're putting our stamp of approval on the Patriot Pyro SE. The drive offers excellent performance with all data types and it's competitively priced. If you're in the market for a good, all-around solid state drive, make sure the Patriot Pyro SE is on your short list of considerations.

Strong Performance
Synchronous Flash Memory
SATA III
Competitive Price

More Expensive Than Corsair Force GT
Faster WildFire Model Only Slightly More Expensive

Tags: SSD, Storage, Patriot, SATA III, Pyro

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com