Patriot Pyro SE Sandforce 240GB SSD Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
859 words · ~4 min read
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Today we have a very exciting product to unbox. This is the Pyro SE. And hold on,
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wait. Before you guys say SE stands for slow edition, which has happened to us
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so many times in the PC industry. I mean, think back. Even going back as far
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as like Radeon 9000 series cards, SE
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meant slow edition or well, you know that other four-letter word that starts
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with S edition. No, this time it means
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special edition in a way that is not like special. It means special like
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faster. So the difference between the Pyro and the Pyrose SE is that instead
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of using async flash, which would make
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the regular Pyro equivalent to something like an Agility 3, so that is as pretty
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much as low-end as it gets in terms of Sanforce 2281 uh SATA 3 6 GB per second
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drives. The Pyrose SE uses synchronized flash, which gives you essentially
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better IOPS performance as well as faster sustained reads and writes. So,
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here we're not quite done with the packaging just yet. So, what does
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Patriot have to say for themselves? These are pretty hoham sort of things to
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call out about this drive. I think the stuff on the back is actually better.
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MLC architecture means we're using MLC flash. Um, I might have said synchronous
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flash, but okay. SATA 3 technology. Okay, that's good. 2 and 12 in form
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factor. But here, here's all the good stuff. Okay. Low power consumption. Yes.
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SATA 3 shock and vibration resistant, which all SSDs are. Silent operation,
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which all SSDs are, and free technical support, which not all SSDs are. So,
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that's kind of cool to have. And you got a three-year warranty. And let's go
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ahead and see what else we got in here. We got a little booklet, which shows us
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okay, some like um specs of the drive.
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Some other more different specs of the drive.
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Um hm, that's interesting. No, I think
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these are quite generic. Hey, look at that. Installation instructions for computer systems, desktops, and servers.
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And installation instructions for notebooks. So, let's go ahead and take the drive out. This guy is capable of
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550 megabytes per second reads, 520 megabytes per second writes, and 85,000
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random 4K IOPS. So, this is, like I said before, is a very high-end SSD. Uh, the
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only way to go higher end is to get something like a Patriot Wildfire, which
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has toggle mand. So, those are the tshiba flash chips. This is using I
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can't actually open it up and find out which synchronous flash they're using,
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but it would be using some kind of a synchronous flash because guys, there
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are three grades of flash chips. So, right now in terms of sandforce
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controllers, there's only the 2281 on the desktop side. That's pretty much it.
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So, we've got only really one controller. And then from there, it
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comes down to the quality of the flash chips. So, async flash is the cheapest
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flash. That's the flash that is going to give you slightly less performance.
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Synchronous flash is more expensive flash than async and it comes with
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slightly higher performance. And then finally at the very top end are toggle
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chips which are these special tshiba ones that are even faster. U but the
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difference between toggle chips and sync flash is not as pronounced as the
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difference between sync flash and async flash. So uh this represents kind of the
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the bang for the buck option in the middle. And it's pretty much standard
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looking as far as SSDs go. So, you got your mounting holes on the side. You got
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your mounting holes on the bottom, depending on how your notebook mounts to drive. Remember, you can use this in
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pretty much any notebook, including uh MacBooks, uh desk, rather, uh Windows
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PCs. There's your SATA power. There's your SATA data. So, what we're actually
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going to be using this drive for is for some Fraps recording. So, uh that was
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why we went ahead and unboxed this. We're also going to be looking at using
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two of these drives. So, we have two. I'm going to use the box to represent
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one of the drives and the drive to represent another one. We're going to run them in RAID and we're going to look
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at what kind of a performance difference we can get using a dual SSD RAID array
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versus a larger hard drive rate array in terms of the read and write pure
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throughput performance we can get for users who for example might be working
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with very large files uh whether it's video editing or image editing. So
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that's one of the other things that's going to be upcoming on my NCIXCOM
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channel with this particular drive. So, thank you for checking out this unboxing
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