today I have a product that's Making Waves right now and it's kind of ironic
cuz it's called a wildfire so how could it make waves waves are made of water
makes no sense at all but what I mean by
Making Waves is that the internets are collectively very excited about this
little product so this is the Wildfire SATA 3 SSD from Patriot this is is the
120 gig version although it is available in other capacities let's go ahead and
look at the side of the package look at the back of the package so what do they have to say for themselves it's a 2 and
1/2 in form factor low power consumption say to three compatible okay good shock
and Vibra vibration resistant it better be silent operation once again it better
be and free technical support okay that's good to know on the side we see
nothing on the bottom we see nothing really oh oh package coming apart here
fix that actually it doesn't matter all right so we've got a little window at
the front let's open that up ooh okay
well here's where all the interesting stuff is oh that's kind of interesting look at that they give you a little map
of all of the uh the pin notes used for the power and the signals on the on the
drive this is like a schematic of the drive that's kind of neat I've never
seen that included for the consumers unless you look pretty deep into the
manufacturer website or like the SATA
standards website okay installation instructions here for desktops and
notebooks as well as some information about the drive so let's have a look
look okay so it's available in 120 240 and 480 gig capacities it supports raid
01 and 0+1 if you use two drives although it would support any raid level
you desire if you use more uh data retention is up to 5 years at 25°
meantime between failure is 1,500,000 hours it does support smart Drive
monitoring and its power consumption is less than 5 Watts at Max operational
Peak Running okay environmental this or that
Operation Shock certification you know it's funny that they don't include any
performance metrics on the packaging because really that's what the Wildfire
is all about this is a second generation
sand Force controller based drive so the 2281 controller and it uses toggle
chips oh okay interesting so I guess
they could pack two drives in one package if they wanted to that's how they designed their packaging but
they've given me one drive and a uh 3 and 1/2 to 2 and 1/2 in adapter it's
funny they didn't even say they included an adapter on the outside here seems
like kind of an oversight doesn't it because that's like a a great selling
point anyway okay so it uses toggle chips in addition to that advanced
controller to achieve higher iops so
that is 4K iops iOS per
second which means that in a desktop or
even a server work Lo this drive will perform as fast as anything else out
there in the market for a single SATA 36
gbit per second drive because the per
okay the performance of an SSD breaks down into a few different things you got
one your controller so the controller dictates what kind of a SATA interface
you can hook up to it it dictates how much processing it can do on the data
for example with a sandforce drive and this uses a sand Force controller it's
actually going to be compressing the data before it writes it to the drive in
order to save the nand that is The Flash
from being overly worn out so it actually if it writes one gig of data it
might actually only physically write 750 megas of data in theoretically some
types of data are more or less compressible than others so that
intelligence in the processor allows it to do that on the fly without you ever
even being aware of it and it's very proven technology at this point so you
got your controller okay the other thing you have is obviously your interface
which is pretty much dictated by the controller next you have the flash so if
you're using a lowquality flash the controller can only read and write so
fast to it also it's only going to last so long okay the quality of the nand
affects how long it's going to last as well as the speed so this is using the
fastest nand out there right now so that is why in terms of thorough put you're
not going to see a drive like this rated for more megabytes per second sequential
than other drives on the market but what you will see is that it is rated for
better random performance so you know when you're you've got a video editing
in the background you've got your antivirus running and you get like a an
MSN message for example which is a very very small piece of data this is going
to be able to do it more quickly than an SSD that doesn't perform little random
things as well as this one does so let's
have a look at the included 3 and 1/2 in to 2 and 1/2 in drive adapter so this is
a pretty standard one I've seen these a number of times there's like one OEM who
makes these and everyone including Corsair ocz and I guess Patriot uses
them so it comes with all the screws you need to mount the SSD to the adapter
tray and then the adapter tray to your case so let's have a quick close-up look
at the Wildfire so it's got a great matte black finish on the top which is
going to look really sharp in your case nice Patriot sticker that's a black
silver see that's a shiny silver sticker those are more expensive you know you
got to you got to sort of notice these things okay you got some red on there
this is also nice too nice little touch you've got kind of a chromed shiny Edge
going all the way around the drive can you see the flash there like it's quite
shiny okay on the side you got your standard mounting holes standard
mounting holes on the other side you got your SATA power and that is a SATA 3 6
gbit per second data interface back there so thank you for checking out my
unboxing of the Patriot Wildfire don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for
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