SandForce solid state drives seem to be the hotness in the market right now, and why wouldn't they be? The SandForce controllers are popular pieces of technology for a reason: their design allows for dispensing with drive cache, and they perform awfully fast. It's no surprise many manufacturers have produced drives based on SandForce hardware, and today we have the 120GB Patriot Inferno SSD (PI120GS25SSDR) on the bench.
The Patriot Inferno SSD ships in capacities of 60GB (PI60GS25SSDR), 120GB, and 240GB (PI240GS25SSDR). Specifications list the SandForce controller as the SF-1222; people used to seeing SandForce controllers noted simply as “SF-1200” might be excused for thinking this is new silicon, but it's basically the same controller being used in all consumer-grade SandForce-based drives.
Since there's such a healthy number of SF-1200-based drives on the market, we'll be looking both at Patriot's implementation of the controller along with what the Inferno brings to the table against the competition.
Specifications:
- SandForce SF-1222 drive controller
- 120GB Unformatted Capacity
- 111.79GB Formatted Capacity
- 285 MB/sec Sustained Read Speed
- 275 MB/sec Sustained Write Speed
- Includes 3.5" bracket
- TRIM support (O/S dependent)
- Data Retention: 5+ years at 25 C
- Data Reliability: Built in BCH 16-bit ECC & 24-bit ECC
- 4K Random Write IOPS up to 14K
- 4K Random Read IOPS up to 5K
- Mean Time Between Failure: Greater than 1,500,000 hours
Aesthetics
Mostly appropriate to its “Inferno” nomenclature, the Patriot Inferno SSD ships in a wine-colored shroud with a basic black label on the top noting the model and capacity. The bottom of the drive is a basic silver plate held in place with Philips-head screws covered by warranty stickers to deter disassembly. The unit is solid, aided by the all-metal casing.
Disassembly
As with all SSDs we disassembled the unit to get a better look. The inside of the Patriot Inferno is about what one would expect for a SandForce-based SSD, with the SF-1222 controller sitting in the center of eight 8GB flash modules; astute viewers will note the Patriot Inferno uses the same flash the recently reviewed OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD does. In fact, the board layout is extremely similar to the OWC's.
The flipside of the single PCB has the other eight 8GB modules. These are Intel 29F65G08CAMDB modules; as mentioned before, these are consistent with the rest of the SandForce SSDs we've reviewed.
Synthetic Benchmarks
We're testing the Patriot Inferno primarily against other SandForce drives, as well as the ubiquitous 160GB Intel X25-M. Drives are tested on our Dell XPS 9000 test bench and benchmarked through the 3.0Gb/s Intel ICH10R SATA controller, running in AHCI mode with TRIM enabled. Our test bench runs Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
We start out with synthetic benchmarks, employing IOMeter and CrystalDiskMark to get a general feel for drive performance. When testing SSDs, we use the standard 512-byte test alongside a 4K test.
Our first test is IOMeter's 2MB sequential transfer test; this test is helpful in seeing how well the drives can hit their advertised transfer speeds, and can prove that not all SF-1200 implementations are equal.
Source : www.storagereview.com
Tags : SandForce, Patriot Inferno SSD, Patriot, PCB, disassembly
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