Introduction

Ever since I first heard about SSDs everyone has said so many great things about them yet I never jumped on the SSD bandwagon until now.

Tons of people have mentioned how fast they were compared to a mechanical hard drive but I figured that I could wait it out until they were around the $1/GB mark.

Well, that day has come and SSDs are finally affordable enough where you can get a big beefy drive for your OS install and a few programs to boot.

Patriot has been kind enough to send a Pyro 120GB SSD to test and get me out of the dark ages of running a mechanical hard drive.

It took lots of kicking and screaming to pry the 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor out of my hands but a 120GB SSD running 25nm NAND memory can do that to a guy.

This drive features the SandForce SF-2281 controller paired to 120GB of 25nm NAND memory. What does that all mean? It means you are getting one freaking fast drive. If you are worried about reliability, don't be. You get a whopping 85,000 IOPS for the 120GB model. Not to mention that it has built in TRIM support which keeps the drive nice and fresh.

The memory is made by Micron and you get 16 chips with 8GB each on them. 16x8 = 128 right? Well, yes. But the drive needs 8GB toward its RAISE partition which allows the drive to run longer and more reliably. So know that you are actually getting a 128GB SSD, but Patriot is kind enough to take that unusable amount out of the name and leaves you with the pre-formatted amount

By using 25nm NAND Patriot is allowed to make larger capacity drives at lower costs which is always great to the consumer.

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