Ever since their release, SSDs have proven to provide an extremely great performance increase. However, this performance increase comes at a cost, as we've seen SSDs range from $100 to up to $1000. As newer drives are released, the price of the older drives is driven down. While this helps make SSDs available at every price point, it doesn't always fill the users' hunger for the best available hardware. With the release of SATA III 6Gb/s drives, SATA II drives have seen a slight price drop, while SATA III drives have taken the spot of the expensive drives. With that being said, Patriot Memory doesn't want you to settle for a SATA II drive while SATA III technology is so widely available. Its solution to the problem is the Patriot Pyro! An extremely fast, yet affordable SATA III 6Gb/s drive, which according to Patriot, takes the place of the best price/performance drive. The Patriot Pyro is not just a low price, it is chock full of extra features. For example, you'll be able to utilize TRIM support, provided that your OS supports it, as well as DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies. The drive is also equipped with "Intelligent Block Management and Wear-leveling", "Intelligent Read Disturb Management", and "Intelligent Recycling for advance free space management". As with all SSDs, you'll also receive the benefit of low power consumption and cool and quiet operation. If that's not enough for you, the Patriot Pyro should have an extremely long life, as well as great data retention, due to its "Best-in-class" ECC. That combined with the drive's high sequential read and write speeds make it an extremely great SSD, if the price is right of course. If the 120GB model featured in this review isn't exactly what you're looking for, the Patriot Pyro also comes in 60GB and 240GB models.
I was in some ways disappointed with the performance the Patriot Pyro offered. In some of our benchmarks, the drive appeared to perform more like a SATA II drive as opposed to a SATA III drive. It's almost as if the Pyro is equipped with capped firmware, which would make sense considering its price range. The drive did however perform great in a few benchmarks, such as the PCMark Vantage benchmark. With all that being said, the Patriot Pyro offered extremely great performance even in the benchmarks it didn't do so hot in. After all, it is an SSD.
It isn't hard to see that purchasing a Patriot Pyro as opposed to something like the OCZ Vertex 3 will cause you to take a performance hit. To some this may be unacceptable, but to me it really all comes down to the Pyro's pricing. At $209, the Patriot Pyro is the cheapest 120GB SATA III SSD we have tested. In my opinion, this makes it a great drive because while it did fall behind in quite a few benchmarks, it was able to hold its own against the more expensive drives. In some ways I would even agree that the Patriot Pyro has the best price/performance ratio of the SATA III drives we tested. I say this because I don't feel like the other drives performed $50 better. With that being said, some users might feel that the faster drives are worth the money and go with them. If you're looking to pick up the 60GB or 240GB Patriot Pyro, the drives are priced at $120 and $449, respectively. However, I do actually feel like the 120GB Pyro used in this review is great bang for your buck!
Click to expand...
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
