Patriot Inferno 100GB SandForce SF-1200 SSD Review

Patriot Inferno – Real World Testing

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first was a 2.12GB collection of mostly JPG files (with a few .MOV files thrown in) of variable size which were taken at CES in January of 2010.

The second was a collection of MP3 files of various sizes that totaled 4.65GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

Install Results: In the real world copy test with media files the Inferno fared very well and outpaced the Intel drive and hanging right in with the Corsair Force as we would expect.

We also timed the installation of a few rather lengthy applications/suites as app installs is something everyone does and waiting for completion can be a drag. We used Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional and Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage as our test subjects with all install settings at default. Both were installed from an installer located on the target drive itself as installing from another drive, especially an optical drive, would cause a bottle-neck that would corrupt the results. The timing for these had to be done via stopwatch so there should be about a half second +/- error margin. Again, with the source and target drives being the same, concurrent read/write activity is required.

Install Results: This time it finished better than both the Intel and the Micron drives albeit a handful of seconds. Seconds seem to last an eternity when you are waiting to play that hot new game!

Last but not least, everyone’s favorite is the Windows start up/shutdown time check.

This test was also performed with a manual timing via stopwatch and should also carry the same half second +/- margin of error. The methodology employed was to force the BIOS to allow user selection of startup drive after load and begin timing from the time the enter button is pressed until the Windows desktop appears on the screen. All of the instances of Windows were identical and freshly installed with only the ATI video driver manually installed.

Install Results: Both the Inferno and Force drives averaged out exactly the same just a few seconds behind the others in the startup of Windows but the shutdown times are all almost identical. If you are used to a mechanical hard drive, the time it takes SSDs to startup and shutdown is just awesome.

We’ll wrap this with a look at the total drive capacity and our final thoughts.