Patriot Wildfire Extreme Speed SATA3 SSD Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,181 words · ~5 min read
0:07
today I have a product that's Making Waves right now and it's kind of ironic
0:11
cuz it's called a wildfire so how could it make waves waves are made of water
0:16
makes no sense at all but what I mean by
0:19
Making Waves is that the internets are collectively very excited about this
0:25
little product so this is the Wildfire SATA 3 SSD from Patriot this is is the
0:30
120 gig version although it is available in other capacities let's go ahead and
0:34
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
0:39
1/2 in form factor low power consumption say to three compatible okay good shock
0:43
and Vibra vibration resistant it better be silent operation once again it better
0:47
be and free technical support okay that's good to know on the side we see
0:51
nothing on the bottom we see nothing really oh oh package coming apart here
0:54
fix that actually it doesn't matter all right so we've got a little window at
0:58
the front let's open that up ooh okay
1:01
well here's where all the interesting stuff is oh that's kind of interesting look at that they give you a little map
1:05
of all of the uh the pin notes used for the power and the signals on the on the
1:11
drive this is like a schematic of the drive that's kind of neat I've never
1:14
seen that included for the consumers unless you look pretty deep into the
1:18
manufacturer website or like the SATA
1:21
standards website okay installation instructions here for desktops and
1:26
notebooks as well as some information about the drive so let's have a look
1:29
look okay so it's available in 120 240 and 480 gig capacities it supports raid
1:34
01 and 0+1 if you use two drives although it would support any raid level
1:38
you desire if you use more uh data retention is up to 5 years at 25°
1:42
meantime between failure is 1,500,000 hours it does support smart Drive
1:48
monitoring and its power consumption is less than 5 Watts at Max operational
1:54
Peak Running okay environmental this or that
1:58
Operation Shock certification you know it's funny that they don't include any
2:02
performance metrics on the packaging because really that's what the Wildfire
2:07
is all about this is a second generation
2:10
sand Force controller based drive so the 2281 controller and it uses toggle
2:20
chips oh okay interesting so I guess
2:25
they could pack two drives in one package if they wanted to that's how they designed their packaging but
2:29
they've given me one drive and a uh 3 and 1/2 to 2 and 1/2 in adapter it's
2:33
funny they didn't even say they included an adapter on the outside here seems
2:37
like kind of an oversight doesn't it because that's like a a great selling
2:41
point anyway okay so it uses toggle chips in addition to that advanced
2:46
controller to achieve higher iops so
2:49
that is 4K iops iOS per
2:54
second which means that in a desktop or
2:58
even a server work Lo this drive will perform as fast as anything else out
3:05
there in the market for a single SATA 36
3:08
gbit per second drive because the per
3:11
okay the performance of an SSD breaks down into a few different things you got
3:15
one your controller so the controller dictates what kind of a SATA interface
3:20
you can hook up to it it dictates how much processing it can do on the data
3:24
for example with a sandforce drive and this uses a sand Force controller it's
3:29
actually going to be compressing the data before it writes it to the drive in
3:34
order to save the nand that is The Flash
3:37
from being overly worn out so it actually if it writes one gig of data it
3:41
might actually only physically write 750 megas of data in theoretically some
3:47
types of data are more or less compressible than others so that
3:50
intelligence in the processor allows it to do that on the fly without you ever
3:54
even being aware of it and it's very proven technology at this point so you
3:58
got your controller okay the other thing you have is obviously your interface
4:02
which is pretty much dictated by the controller next you have the flash so if
4:06
you're using a lowquality flash the controller can only read and write so
4:10
fast to it also it's only going to last so long okay the quality of the nand
4:15
affects how long it's going to last as well as the speed so this is using the
4:18
fastest nand out there right now so that is why in terms of thorough put you're
4:23
not going to see a drive like this rated for more megabytes per second sequential
4:28
than other drives on the market but what you will see is that it is rated for
4:32
better random performance so you know when you're you've got a video editing
4:36
in the background you've got your antivirus running and you get like a an
4:40
MSN message for example which is a very very small piece of data this is going
4:46
to be able to do it more quickly than an SSD that doesn't perform little random
4:51
things as well as this one does so let's
4:54
have a look at the included 3 and 1/2 in to 2 and 1/2 in drive adapter so this is
4:59
a pretty standard one I've seen these a number of times there's like one OEM who
5:03
makes these and everyone including Corsair ocz and I guess Patriot uses
5:08
them so it comes with all the screws you need to mount the SSD to the adapter
5:12
tray and then the adapter tray to your case so let's have a quick close-up look
5:16
at the Wildfire so it's got a great matte black finish on the top which is
5:20
going to look really sharp in your case nice Patriot sticker that's a black
5:24
silver see that's a shiny silver sticker those are more expensive you know you
5:27
got to you got to sort of notice these things okay you got some red on there
5:32
this is also nice too nice little touch you've got kind of a chromed shiny Edge
5:36
going all the way around the drive can you see the flash there like it's quite
5:39
shiny okay on the side you got your standard mounting holes standard
5:44
mounting holes on the other side you got your SATA power and that is a SATA 3 6
5:48
gbit per second data interface back there so thank you for checking out my
5:52
unboxing of the Patriot Wildfire don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for
5:56
more unboxings reviews and other computer videos o