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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