The competition is the SSD arena is heating up. Never ever have there been so many SSD controllers driving that SSD towards high-performance and some of the best features.

Within that mindset, Patriot wanted to release another SSD, something a little over the top and as such that meant releasing the Pyro SE SSD. While based on the SandForce 2281 controller Patriot did apply some tweaks to make the product even faster.

The market is changing though and the dominance of SandForce based SSDs seems to decrease. OCZ for example just released a product with their proprietary Indilinx controller and a handful of companies started selling products based on that Marvell controller. And that's an interesting dynamic to witness in the technology channel alright.

To keep it up to snuff Patriot thus launched the Pyro SE, which comes with synchronous NAND flash memory. According to Patriot that will increase its sequential read and write performance to 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively, which makes the Pyro SE just as fast as the OCZ Vertex 3.

Maximum 4K random write performance remained unchanged and is estimated at 85,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). As is the case with most other SSDs, the performance of the Pyro SE drives varies according to their capacity, as smaller-sized units don't usually have all the memory channels available from the controller populated and might be a notch slower.

Have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.