When we checked out Patriot's new mainstream Pyro series of SSDs back in early August we were overall quite impressed with the performance on tap considering the associated pricing. These weren't meant to go up against the heavy hitting SandForce drives running more expensive, faster performing synchronous flash, but still gave you very impressive performance at a lower price point.

Nonetheless, Patriot has just stepped things up with a new line of Pyro series drives that push performance to new heights thanks to the use of synchronous NAND. Dubbed the Pyro SE series, the new drives are otherwise much the same as the original Pyro ones except for the aforementioned change.

There are two capacity options in the new series at this time; 120 and 240GB, and performance figures look real strong, nearing the limits of SATA III with up to 550MB/sec read speeds and 520MB/sec write. Max 4K random writes come in at 85,000 IOPS.

While pricing on the new Pyro SE series has not yet been revealed, Patriot promises increased performance while still maintaining their aggressive pricing strategy.