Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

2011 has come to an end, but that doesn't mean technology is slowing down one bit. For the second year in a row the solid state drive market was dominated by SandForce. If you wanted to produce a drive that was capable of the highest performance possible, you needed to start with a SandForce SF-2200 Series controller and pair it with either ONFi 2.0 or Toggle Mode NAND flash.

Looking out on the horizon we don't see SandForce trying to leap frog themselves early this year and we don't see why they would need to. Last month we looked at the latest from Indilinx (OCZ Octane) and Marvell (Corsair Performance Pro) and neither controller managed to muster the performance of the SF-2281. Sometime in the middle of 2012 we'll see Team SandForce manufactures move to 24nm Toggle Mode and maybe even 20nm IMFT flash, but neither of these technologies will bring a great deal to the table over the tried and true SF-2281 / synchronous flash combination we have today. The Patriot Pyro SE uses this magical combination to deliver amazing performance for general computing tasks and at an equally amazing price point.

Patriot's Pyro brand hasn't been a stranger to our pages. We've looked at the 120GB and 240GB baseline models with asynchronous and found them to be the entry level for high speed SSDs in 2011. The Pyro SE is the next evolution, a tick higher on the ladder and uses more expensive but faster performing synchronous flash.

Both products offer very good access times, the performance you feel while opening programs and Windows, but the SE is capable of delivering greater performance when the drive start to get populated with data. Our Fill Test shows the SE is capable of substantial performance gains or more appropriately less performance loss when compared to the asynchronous flash models on the market.

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Crucial m4 512GB Solid State Drive w/ the 0009 Update Review

Introduction

If you own a Crucial m4 solid state drive, we have good news. The company has released a firmware update that is said to increase sequential performance by up to 20%, lower latency and lower system boot up time negotiating with host controllers faster. Compatibility with certain chipsets has also been improved and we suspect some undisclosed fixes were also stuffed in as well. We've updated our entire portfolio of Crucial m4 products with the new 0009 firmware, all the way from the 64GB to the newest 512GB model. The updated benchmark results will be in our performance charts from this point forward.

This article isn't just about the new "free performance" firmware update, though. We have Crucial's largest SSD to date on the test bench and with it a big smile on our faces. We rarely hear about the largest SSD capacity sizes since they are generally beyond what most enthusiasts spend on a single product for their system, but prices have been falling rapidly. On its release the Crucial m4 512GB SSD cost over 1,000 USD and even at that price it was a bargain compared to the 1,700 Dollar Vertex 3 480GB. After a quick search this morning, we found the 512GB m4 available online for less than 600 Dollars.

You may think we've been overcome by SSD intoxication, but the price of these massive capacity products is starting to look good. Not really good or pretty good, but good. Once you come to grips with the actual capacity and the amount of data that can be stored on a 512GB drive, things start to look better. Before you know it something clicks and the price becomes secondary to the performance and capacity offered.

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Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo 16GB USB 3.0 Thumb Drive Review

After being underwhelmed by the Mach Xtreme MX-GX last week, we are moving onto the new Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo USB 3.0. Personally, I haven't seen too many Sharkoon products, but the company has a solid reputation. Their product line up spans several categories, but storage components and flash products seem to be their speciality.

Sharkoon currently has four flash based portable storage drives with two using the USB 3.0 interface. The Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo that we are looking at today is the flagship.

The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo has the typical cheesy name that comes along with most thumb drives, but this one doesn't follow the traditional paths. To start things off, this USB 3.0 drive uses Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash, the same flash found on enterprise SSDs. The SLC flash gives the Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo the ability to read and write data at the same speed, 130MB/s.

Most of the drives hitting our labs these days have comparable read speed, but their write speeds are nowhere near that of the Extreme Duo. By using synchronized flash, Sharkoon was able to deliver a high speed flash drive with balanced read / write performance.

The Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo is available in two capacity sizes of 16 and 32GB.We've had the 16GB drive in our lab for a couple of weeks now, but I'm still not able to find the drive available in the US. Sharkoon has some products available at Newegg, but not the Extreme Duo.

Using ATTO as my initial test, I achieved read and write speeds in excess of 130MB/s. The performance ramped up quickly and the drive showed good speeds all the way down to the 8K block size.

The write latency seemed to be the only weak point on the Extreme Duo. Here we see the drive with an average latency of 451ms. On an SSD this would be an indication of a poor level of performance, but when transferring data to a flash drive it's about on average for what we are seeing from other products.

The speed would make it difficult to run intense programs from the flash drive, though. As long as you are just planning on using the drive for storage and data transfers, you'll be fine.

In CrystalDiskMark we are looking at the 4K performance. USB 3.0 doesn't support native command queuing, so the queue depth tests are meaningless. Here we see the Extreme Duo delivering over 12MB/s read at 4K, but the writes were just over .5MB/s.

AS SSD Copy Benchmark was used to determine the real world file transfer speed of the thumb drives. Three tests are ran; ISO, Program and Game. The ISO file is a large file, Program is a series of small files and Game is a mix of several large and small files.

The ISO test went by very quickly, just 16 seconds and at an average speed of 67MB/s. Large file transfers are not going to be a problem with the Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo.

The Program test that uses several smaller files took quite a bit longer due to the 4K write performance. This test took just under 80 seconds and had an average speed of 18MB/s.

The Game test which uses a mix of large and small files went better than the program test. The Game test rook just 37 seconds and had an average speed of 37MB/s.

Sharkoon's press release stated the 16GB Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo is capable of handling over 100,000 writes per cell due to the SLC flash used. This is much higher than what you'd get with a MLC drive.

The press release also states that the 16GB model that we looked at today has an MSRP of around 50 EUROs. The price is very good for the performance, technology and longevity that you are getting with the Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo. This is a flash drive that you will be able to use for several years even with heavy use.

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Mach Xtreme MX-GX USB 3.0 16GB Thumb Drive Review

It's been awhile since we looked at a thumb drive, but it's time to get back into the thick of things. Over the coming days we'll see three of the latest and greatest USB 3.0 thumb drives that are capable of holding large amounts of data and transferring that data at high speeds. The last drive we looked at was the Mach Xtreme MX-FX; today we are looking at Mach Xtreme's newest offering, the MX-GX.

The Mach Xtreme GX is available in four capacity sizes; 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Each capacity size has a different read / write speed rating even though they all use a quad channel controller. Today we are looking at the 16GB model that is capable of 140MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds.

After a few minutes of searching, I was able to find the Mach Xtreme MX-GX 16GB online for 49.99 USD at Amazon.com. This price falls in line with other 16GB USB 3.0 drives with similar read / write speeds. Google only reported one hit, though, on our product search, so there aren't too many of them floating around on this side of the pond.

Our initial testing with ATTO gave us a read speed of nearly 100MB/s and a write speed of around 20MB/s. These results were recorded without using Mach Xtreme's add-on software layer that is designed to improve transfer speeds. With the software installed we saw a performance gain, but I'm still not sold on end users installing a software package on each of their systems just for flash drives. Motherboard manufacturers are adding a 'Turbo USB 3" feature in the BIOS that gets around the software layer, but so far we've only achieved limited success.

As you'll see at the top of the next column, in CrystalDiskMark we found that the Mach Xtreme MX-GX performed very well when reading data, but the write performance was around the same speed as a good USB 2.0 flash drive. Depending on how you use the MX-GX, this could be an issue.

If you plan to put a large amount of data on the drive and then use the Mach Xtreme MX-GX to read that data on different computers, then you will be fine; it'll just take longer to put that data on the first time. If you plan on using the MX-GX as temporary storage that is constantly revolving data, then you will have to wait on the write process more often. At just 30MB/s write speed you will be waiting around quite a bit for large files.

If that isn't bad enough, the 4K write speed is only .01MB/s; you will be waiting around for small file transfers as well. Let's take a look at how the synthetic numbers relate to real world performance.

AS SSD Copy Benchmark was used to determine the real world file transfer speed of the thumb drives. Three tests are ran; ISO, Program and Game. The ISO file is a large file, Program is a series of small files and Game is a mix of several large and small files.

The real world file transfer speed of the Mach Xtreme MX-GX isn't that great. Actually....we've tested USB 2.0 drives that were faster.

The MX-GX wasn't without issue either. The software package caused all sorts of trouble when we plugged the drive into a USB 2.0 port and the drive went half crazy when tested with AIDA64 (the latency tests). I wouldn't suggest anyone test this flash drive with AIDA64. You can add AS SSD's standard test as well. Since the 4K write speed is so slow, the test takes forever. We stopped the 4K write test after 18 hours.

No one likes to be a spoil sport, but the Mach Xtreme MX-GX just didn't do it for me. The testing issues turned me off from the drive right at the start, but the real world performance when trying to transfer files was the final straw. The last chance was transferring data off a Lenovo W701ds (with USB 3.0) and the data writes just took forever. I eventually just pulled the HDD and transferred the data over SATA.

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Create a Chameleon USB Rescue Drive Using MultiBeast

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It's always a good idea to keep a copy of iBoot on hand in case things go wrong with your install. You can easily boot from it and then choose your system drive.  But what happens when you don't have access to an optical drive?  Things can get complicated. Here's a guide that will help you install Chameleon and other necessary files on any USB flash drive.

PLEASE NOTE: USB Rescue drives will NOT boot the Mac OS X Retail DVD.  You will need an optical drive to do an installation using iBoot + MultiBeast.

YOU WILL NEED

• A blank USB drive of any size- even an old 512mb one will work!
• A computer running Mac OS X
• MultiBeast
• Your motherboard-specific DSDT from the DSDT Database

STEP 1: FORMAT THE USB DRIVE

1. Boot into your existing Mac OS X Installation.
2. Insert your USB drive.
3. Open Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility

4. Highlight your USB drive in the left column.
5. Click the Partition Tab.
6. Click Volume Scheme- choose 1 Partition
7. Click Options…
8. Select GUID Partition Table. Click OK.
9. In the Name: field type: USB Rescue
10. In Format: field select Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled)
11. Click Apply, then click Partition.

STEP 2: DOWNLOAD YOUR MOTHERBOARD'S DSDT

1. Visit the DSDT Database
2. Download your motherboard's DSDT, and place the .aml file on the Desktop

STEP 3: RUN MULTIBEAST ON THE USB DRIVE

1. Open MultiBeast
2. In Select a Destination screen, choose USB Rescue (If you don't get this option,  press Continue, then select Change Install Location...)
3. Select UserDSDT
4. Click Continue, then Install

There you have it!  A Chameleon USB Rescue drive!  If you ever need to boot from it, go to your computer's boot menu at startup (F12 on Gigabyte boards) and choose the USB drive. When you get to the Chameleon boot screen, choose your system drive. If you have any issues booting your hard drive, you can always use -s to enter single-user mode to modify and repair disk, -x to enter safe mode, or -v for verbose mode.

 -tonymacx86 & MacMan

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