14 DAY TRIAL // A little more than two weeks after it announced that it has started shipping the Wildfire SSD, Patriot Memory introduced a new SandForce based drive, dubbed the Pyro , that is targeting more price conscious buyers.
Patriot's new solid state drive series will be comprised of three models that span in capacity between 60GB and 240GB, and all of these will use the 2.5-inch form factor that is standard for most notebooks.
At the heart of all three units stands the SandForce SF-2281 controller that seems to be paired with asynchronous MLC NAND Flash memory.
While this provides slower performance than the synchronous Flash used in more expensive drives, it does have the benefit of allowing manufacturers to drop the prices of their SSDs since it's significantly cheaper to buy and manufacture.
Furthermore, the performance hit isn't as severe as one would think and the 120GB and 240GB drives can still achieve sequential write speeds of up to 520MB/s, while sequential reads are rated at 550MB/s.
In the case of the 60GB drive, these speeds are limited at 515MB/s read and 490MB/s write.
Random 4K write performance is also slower on the 60GB SSD as this is rated at 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), 5,000 IOPS less than its older brothers.
As all SandForce SF-2200-based drives, the Pyro sports a native SATA 6Gbps connection and it supports the DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies.
Unfortunately, Patriot refrained itself from providing any information regarding the release date and price of the Pyro SSD series.
When released, Patriot's drives will go head to head against models such as the OCZ Agility 3, the Mushkin Chronos, or the recently announced DS Fusion from Mach Xtreme. All of these SSDs are based on second-generation 6Gbps SandForce controllers and include asynchronous MLC NAND Flash. (via TechPowerUp)