Patriot Pyro 120GB SandForce SF-2281 SSD Review

Inside the Pyro

When we kick the tires, we also like to take a look under the hood to see what kind of hardware we’re dealing with and it’s no different with the Patriot Pyro SSD.

Four Allen screws are all it takes to split apart the shell and reveal the components within. No screws hold the PCB and it pulls away from the shell easily for us to have a closer look.

As usual, one side features a plethora of NAND neatly stacked towards the end of the board opposite of the SATA connectors. Absent are any markings on the PCB in terms of the Patriot name or logo.

A closer look shows the modules to be 25nm MLC flash of Micron manufacture. Each asynchronous modules are 64 Gb (8 GB) in density with eight modules on each side totaling 128 GB of on board storage.

On the flip side we have the remaining eight NAND modules as well as the controller. This is the standard configuration for most of the SandForce drives we’ve seen.

On the other side lies the remaining NAND modules along with the SandForce controller. As with all other SandForce based drives, there’s no cache.

The latest and greatest generation of consumer SandForce SF-2200 controllers sits proudly on the Pyro drive. Relying heavily on real-time data compression to reach peak performance, the controller emplys firmware that is generally customized by each manufacture which can account for variations in performance between each. It’s proprietary DuraClass technology handles all of the mundane tasks like real-time compression, wear-leveling, error correction, among other things. It is also responsible for performance maintenance with features like idle garbage collection and TRIM. Overall, most of the drives we’ve seen with this controller exhibit performance relatively close to their peers of various manufacture. Let’s where the Pyro falls in the pack.