Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

With the SE edition of the Pyro, Patriot brought a very fast and competitive product to the market. The usage Synchronous NAND flash will give the product a little more bite really. Whether or not you'd actually notice that in real-world usage we doubt a little. But for the performance mongers amongst us, it can't get any better anno 2011.

Being SandForce 2281 based the peak read and write performance on this product will be a notch higher when you compare it to marvel and Indilinx based product. When you focus purely at IOPS performance, well that's where an SSD like this is a winner, hands down.

The big question remains, and its totally up top you, if you still, trust SandForce 2200 series based products. There have been quite a lot of issues with this controller with numerous firmware releases. We can inform you that the initial bug was found and eliminated. The SandForce controllers are very stable and it should not be a reason to "not" get one. But storage is all about reliability, and if that reputation is damaged... well it might be until the next generation until people will regain that trust. Me personally, I'd have no hesitation picking one up. In fact most test machines here in the lab all run SF2281 based products.

An SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your SATA 3 compatible laptop or SATA 3 compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series, so you you copy a fast amount of compressed data, then the Pyro will slay and slaughter in performance.

Some overall recommendations then. Should you be in the market for a SATA 3 SSD then we have a couple of hints though, we absolutely prefer the performance of the Intel Series 6 (H67/P67/Z68/X79) integrated SATA 6G controller over anything else available in the market. If you run an AMD chipset with the added Marvell 6G controller for example, you will see lower performance. The Asmedia controllers we spotted lately on motherboards is offering good performance, albeit still 25% slower then Intel. Also make sure you run your drive in AHCI mode, it does make a difference.

Prices HDD versus SSD -- well my advice is simple and I'll keep repeating this in each and every SSD conclusion; you probably should stop looking at the Solid State Disk technology as if it were a traditional HDD. We all will be old and grey before the two reach the same prices or top the multiple TB volume storage the HDD offers for less money. Comparing an SSD with an HDD is making a comparison in-between an integrated IGP or a dedicated graphics card, that last one will cost you a heck of a lot more yet you gain incredible overall performance. It is the very same with an SSD, use it as boot drive on Windows and applications and you instantly have removed a huge bottleneck, load and access times. It is a difference in-between night and day (in a proper system). For massive storage like movies, MP3 files and bulky data you do not access on a regular basis, sure that's where the HDD remains the winner.

The magic simply is finding a good combination in-between the two and balance things out. That's where the magic happens. I kid you not, all my test systems and work systems run on SSDs, not once have I considered going back to HDDs. The benefits of a good SSD are simply grand. But that doesn't mean I do not understand the budget and cost dilemma that many of you are facing though. There are still many variables and unknowns regarding life-span.

So yeah 2012 is going to be an interesting year alright, there are new competitive players in the SSD arena when it comes to brands but also the soiree of SATA 3 SSD controllers. So we expect the dynamic to shift in 2012 alright, especially with the one fact in mind that SandForce has been purchased by LSI recently.

All these options in the SSD arena will only make things more competitive and that as always drives performance up and prices down. Which is a good thing of course.

Choice is good. With the Pyro SE Patriot brings an incredible sexy and high performing product to the market. I have no hesitation whatsoever to use it in one of my systems. At a price of roughly 180 EUR for a 120GB model it will be slightly more expensive then a asynchronous version, whether or not you feel the extra tenner is worth that little extra bite in performance we'll leave up to you. But personally we'd be happy to chip in the extra dough. What a nice product!

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