Patriot Spreads Wildfire with Fast SATA 6Gbps SSD

Testing Methodology
For comparison purposes we will be testing the Wildfire against the Intel 160GB X25-M SSD. As usual, we here at BSN* like to shake things up a little bit and provide you with an alternative to the same old tired review. Pitting the Wildfire against the Intel X25-M is not our attempt at a toe-to-toe fight. The Wildfire is a much newer drive and offers somewhat of a different feature set, so we are not looking to call this is an apples to oranges comparison. What we are providing is a showcase of the advancements in SSD technology and how rapidly improvements are being implemented. Not too long ago the mentality was that an SSD was an SSD. If you simply had an SSD (regardless of manufacturer etc) you were pretty much guaranteed performance gains. Now that the industry has progressed, SSD's have gone the way of other components like video cards and processors, performance gains seem to be around every corner and vendors are working overtime to kick out drives with ever increasing performance. You may be happy with your current SSD or you may be wondering if an upgrade is a worthwhile investment. Read on to see what we have to say.

In order to test this SSD we will be using our Lab test rig.

• Intel Core i7 2600K Processor at 3.4GHz (Supplied by Intel)
• MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 Motherboard
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Video Card
• 2x 2GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 MHz Memory
• Enermax Revolution 1kW PSU
• Samsung SyncMaster 2443BW 24" 1900x1200 display

ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO disk benchmark is about as straight forward as you can get. The benchmark is a no frills solution that forgoes fancy graphics and UI's, instead it focuses on providing you with the hard and fast performance numbers for your hard drive. In order to provide the most standardized and therefor comparable data we test with the applications default settings.

Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD ATTO Benchmark Results: 559MB/s read, 512MB/s write

ATTO serves us up with our initial performance numbers. Clearly the Wildfire is on top in terms of performance with roughly 2x Read performance and over 8x write performance. This test also partially validates Patriots performance claims of "Sequential Read & Write Transfer: 555MB/s read | 520MB/s Write". With recorded The drive actually exceeds the claims made on Read performance and just narrowly misses the claim of 520MB/s write.


SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP2b
SiSoft Sandra acts as a system wide benchmark, allowing you to test the performance of the system as whole or simply test individual components. For the SSD test, we chose the Physical Disk module, and more specifically we ran the Read test to illustrate the Read performance of each drive. Sandra's official description of the test module is as follows:

"Benchmark hard disks (i.e. the disk itself, not the file system). Shows how your physical disks connected to the storage adapters or hosts compare to other disks in a typical computer. As the test measures raw performance it is independent on the file system the disk uses and any volumes mounted off the disk."

Right out of the chute we see the Patriot drive establishing a strong lead in Read performance. At 513MB/s the Patriot drive is more than twice as fast as the Intel drive.


AIDA64

AIDA64 Average Read Access shows that SandForce SP-2200 controller and SATA-III interface reduced the latency by massive 30%

AIDA 64 can be deemed as the most recent iteration of the original Everest benchmark suite as AIDA 64 has replaced this time honored system benchmarking utility. AIDA offers a myriad of benchmarking test but what we have chosen to focus on here is the Average Read Access benchmark. Results are measured in ms and are akin to latency. In this test the thing to remember is lower the number, the better the performance.

Unsurprisingly we see that the advancements made by the Wildfire result in a 30% reduction in latency resulting in a much more responsive drive.

PCMark 7
The recent release of PCMark 7 has provided us with yet another tool to test hardware. PCMark 7 is a little different in that it doesn't truly fit into either the Synthetic or Real World benchmark definition, instead it lies somewhere in the middle. At its core PCMark 7 may be considered a synthetic benchmark, however when it comes to the actual tests it runs, they are all based on real world usage models. For example, the System Storage benchmark is made up seven modules that test day to day usage models. Activities such as importing pictures, starting applications, video editing and more are run to best simulate the types of tasks a hard drive has to routinely perform.


Unlike the other tests, Wildfire 120GB can pull ahead by only 12%

When it comes to the wide assortment of common tasks that PCMark 7 replicates the Patriot drive comes out on top again. The additional performance of the Wildfire shows it's strength here as well. The raw performance gains noticed in previous tests are further validated by real world disk usage scenarios and further illustrate the impact that an upgrade to a high performance SSD drive like the Wildfire can have on increased performance across the disk usage spectrum.