Introduction

2011 has come to an end, but that doesn't mean technology is slowing down one bit. For the second year in a row the solid state drive market was dominated by SandForce. If you wanted to produce a drive that was capable of the highest performance possible, you needed to start with a SandForce SF-2200 Series controller and pair it with either ONFi 2.0 or Toggle Mode NAND flash.

Looking out on the horizon we don't see SandForce trying to leap frog themselves early this year and we don't see why they would need to. Last month we looked at the latest from Indilinx (OCZ Octane) and Marvell (Corsair Performance Pro) and neither controller managed to muster the performance of the SF-2281. Sometime in the middle of 2012 we'll see Team SandForce manufactures move to 24nm Toggle Mode and maybe even 20nm IMFT flash, but neither of these technologies will bring a great deal to the table over the tried and true SF-2281 / synchronous flash combination we have today. The Patriot Pyro SE uses this magical combination to deliver amazing performance for general computing tasks and at an equally amazing price point.

Patriot's Pyro brand hasn't been a stranger to our pages. We've looked at the 120GB and 240GB baseline models with asynchronous and found them to be the entry level for high speed SSDs in 2011. The Pyro SE is the next evolution, a tick higher on the ladder and uses more expensive but faster performing synchronous flash.

Both products offer very good access times, the performance you feel while opening programs and Windows, but the SE is capable of delivering greater performance when the drive start to get populated with data. Our Fill Test shows the SE is capable of substantial performance gains or more appropriately less performance loss when compared to the asynchronous flash models on the market.