Page 10 - Conclusion
Before I put the facts down on paper, let's get the price issue out of the way first. At press time, the Patriot Pyro SE 240GB is about $400 after mail in rebate from a popular US online retailer. The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB is about $340 after mail in rebate at the same place; keep in mind that both drives are built with essentially the same hardware under the hood. For most people, it is easy to brush the Patriot drive aside and just recommend OCZ, and that is kind of what I did when I wrote my Pyro 120GB review late last year. Patriot's response to my article was that they will be "working on the price". If you take a look at the Pyro 120GB and Agility 3 120GB today, Patriot did exactly as promised -- make their price competitive. I am sure the same will go for the Pyro SE in the near future. With that in mind, let's take a look at performance. If you skipped through the last eight pages and jumped straight to this concluding paragraph, I will just present to you this simple fact: The Patriot Pyro SE 240GB is a drive that delivers wonderful performance. Trading punches with OCZ's flagship Vertex 3 Max IOPS, and actually beating it out in a number of tests while remaining surprisingly competitive in both full synthetic and semi-synthetic benchmarks, all I have to say is -- wow, nice. The only set of tests the Pyro SE 240GB did not perform exceptionally well in is PCMark Vantage. I am guessing this is more of a firmware issue than a hardware disadvantage, so if Patriot could continue to work on optimizing their code, we can certainly expect to see better results down the road. The bottom line is, where else can you find such a sleek looking drive that's assembled in the USA?
Patriot Memory provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH:Renewal Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
While it sure is cold outside here in Calgary and Al Gore is nowhere to be found, Nero would sure be proud of the Patriot Pyro SE 240GB.
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Page Index
1. Introduction and Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Installation, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Conclusion
