Patriot Pyro SE Solid State Drive

Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage

Written by Olin Coles

Monday, 05 December 2011

Table of Contents: Page Index
Patriot Pyro SE Solid State Drive
Closer Look: Patriot Pyro SE
Features and Specifications
SSD Testing Methodology
AS-SSD Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Tests
Iometer IOPS Performance
EVEREST Disk Benchmark
PCMark Vantage HDD Tests
Patriot Pyro SE SSD Conclusion

Page 6 of 11

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

ATTO Disk Benchmark: Queue Depth 4 (Default)

Our bandwidth speed tests begin with the Patriot Pyro SE SSD attached to the Intel P67-Express SATA 6Gb/s controller operating in AHCI mode. Using the ATTO Disk Benchmark tool, the test drive performs basic file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB. This 240GB model Pyro SE reports 558 MBps maximum read speeds that plateau from 512-8192 KB file chunks, and 528 MBps peak write bandwidth plateaus from 64-8192 KB. These results both match Patriot's own specifications for the Pyro SE-series solid state drive.

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool...

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Comments

# Sweet — Mergatroid 2011-12-12 16:32

I've owned a Patriot Inferno for almost a year now and it's been very reliable. The Pyro looks like it's continuing a solid reputation for a quality product.

Great review, and I enjoyed reading about your benchmark selections and reasoning. This latest generation of SSDs sure provide amazing performance.

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# Comparison Between Models — redwolfe_98 2011-12-16 10:49

i would have liked to have seem a comparison of the performance of the 60 GB, the 120 GB and the 240 GB models of the patriot pyro SSD's.. i understand that if all of those were not provided, then they couldn't be tested.. from what i have seen, there can be big differences between the smaller and larger capacity SSD's..

to me, the prices on the patriot pyro SSD's look good, compared to what i have seen with other SSD's, which, incidentally, are too expensive, for me..

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# RE: Comparison Between Models — Olin Coles 2011-12-16 13:47

Thanks for your comment. To be honest, I would have liked to receive one of every capacity so they could be tested as well. Sadly, that's not how these manufacturers send samples. In terms of maximum performance the differences are very small, but those differences get big once the NAND gets filled (but not with the Pyro SE series because it uses synchronous NAND flash components).

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# RE: Patriot Pyro SE Solid State Drive — redwolfe_98 2011-12-16 10:54

to add to my last post (since i can't edit it), i should have said that the price on the 120 GB unit looks good, to me.. the price on the 240 GB unit is comparible to those from other vendors, which is too expensive for me..

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# Dude — mjpatter63 2012-01-07 17:29

Nice review. You should test these on AMD chipsets/mobos. You will get very different results, not only with the Pyro SE but all of the Sandforce controller used SSD'd. I have tested the Kingston HyperX and Vertex 3 Max IOPS and the Pyro SE. With compressed sequential data they get similar results as the SSD's on Intel chipsets using iStor. On an AMD board ( I've tested on SB850 and 9 series chipsets, using the AMD sata controller) and the 4K, 4KQD32, and especially random reads drops to 60% less than the Intel boards. The SSD's that have worked best for me and test well across the board are the Crucial C30, M4(Marvell contr) and Samsung 830(Samsung Contr.)These were 120gb drives. Just my findings for the AMD folks out there.

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# Re: SB850 — Shanon 2012-01-17 20:26

I agree with this comment as far as the need for testing hardware on more than one platform. Did you notice any stability issues when testing the Crucial M4 or the Samsung 830 on the SB850? I've been looking at both of these SSD's, after having experienced the "disappearing drive" issue with the OCZ Vertex 3 (which I've come to understand as a compatibility issue between the Sandforce Controller and the SB850). I'd love to add a 256GB SSD as the application drive for my system, but not enough to have to upgrade my mobo (and consequently my CPU): I just built this system 7 months ago.

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# Mr. — Tim 2012-01-17 15:39

"after only a few minutes I was booting from a restored Windows 7 System Image"
Can I assume that if I have already done a W7 install on a HD that I can use this procedure to move W7 over to the ssd if I purchase one? I am new to W7 and system image? Currently all I have installed on a new build is the W7 OS..Thanks

Do you reply to email also??? or do I check back here...guess I will find out if you respond to my email...preferred...thanks

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# RE: Mr. — Olin Coles 2012-01-17 15:47

Yes, you can clone from a hard drive to the SSD without re-installing Windows. See here:
benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=439

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# Offset — Mergatroid 2012-01-17 17:28

SSDs requite a particular "offset" for the format. If this offset is not correct, you can end up writing to two blocks instead of one for every write, which will kill performance and reduce the lifespan of the SSD.

Some imaging software is offset aware for SSDs and some is not. If your software does not work properly with an SSD and you create a hard drive image, when you restore the image to the SSD you will have the wrong offset.

Some imaging software will use whatever offset is in the image. Under these conditions a restore will provide the wrong offset. If the image was made from an SSD in the first place, then it should restore the correct offset.

Some imaging software has been updated so that it will use the correct offset when restoring even a hard drive image to an SSD.

This all depends on the software. You MUST check your software and if necessary contact the publisher and find out how it handles offsets. If you restore a hard drive image to an SSD with the incorrect offset, as far as I know the only way to correct it is to completely do a fresh install of Windows 7. I have seen people claim they can correct the offset after an incorrect image restore, but I tried it and the performance was not what it should have been. I had to load the recovery console, command line interface and run the diskpart software to format the drive and apply the correct offset.

All that can be avoided in two ways:
1: Do a fresh clean install to begin with and windows 7 will do everything correctly.

or

2: Create and restore your hard drive image using image software that is SSD offset aware.

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# Re Offset — spitcake 2013-03-06 15:00

AS SSD Benchmark will tell you if the drive's not aligned to 4k boundaries. If that happens, best to purchase Paragon Alignment tool.
handy to have for anyone playing with SSD's, and you re-use it once you buy it. There's other ways to re-align, but for $30 the Paragon Tool will save you a lot of headaches.

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ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark: Queue Depth 4 (Default)

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