Patriot Ignite 480GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Patriot Ignite 480GB3. High Res Gallery4. Testing Methodology5. CrystalDiskMark6. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. IOMETER9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

Patriot. A name I haven't heard in quite some time. Years ago we reviewed a steady stream of their products, then they seemed to vanish from view to focus solely on mobile accessories. While the recent shift back may only be a cautious toe in the water today we look at their latest Solid State Drive, dubbed the ‘Ignite'. On a side note, the company have ditched the Sandforce controller, opting for a Phison controller.

The Patriot Ignite 480GB is a SATA 6Gb/s SSD and is the flagship model in a range of three drives the company are selling right now. The lower cost Blaze and Torch incorporate the Phison S9 controller while the Ignite ships with the higher grade Phison S10 controller. We think someone within the Patriot leadership must be suffering from Pyromania.

Interestingly the Ignite we are looking at today is only offered in two capacities – 480GB and 960GB. If you want a smaller drive from Patriot, then you will need to get a Blaze or Torch.

The Ignite is rated at up to 560MB/s sequential read and 545MB/s sequential write. 4k random read is rated to 80K IOPS and 4k random write up to 75K IOPS. As we would expect it has full support for TRIM, NCQ and incorporates intelligent advanced wear leveling and ECC recovery. There is also AES 256 bit Encryption support.

The drive has a 3 year warranty with a MTBF rating of 2,000,000 hours.

Patriot Ignite 480GB Features:

• Operating Temperature – 0° ~ 70°C
• Native Command Queuing (NCQ) – Up to 32 commands
• ECC Recovery: Up to 115bits/2KB
• MTBF: 2,000,000 hours
• 4K Aligned Random Read: 80K IOPs
• 4K Aligned Random Write: 75K IOPs
• Sequential Read & Write Transfer:
  Up to 560MB/s Read | 545MB/s Write (*Based on ATTO)
• O/S Support: Windows® XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / Mac® OS / Linux
• DRAM Cache: 480GB = 512MB | 960GB = 1024MB
• SATA3 6Gbps/SATA2 3Gbps
• TRIM support (O/S dependent)
• End-to-end data path protection (ETEP)
• Advanced wear-leveling
• Advanced Garbage Collection
• Smart ECC
• Smart Refresh

The Patriot Ignite 480GB arrives in a simple pack with the drive fully on show. Considering the ‘fiery' names I had half expected to see some fire related artwork on the box, so I was a little disappointed.

The rear covers the basic information – basically highlighting you are getting a 7mm thick, SATA III 2.5 inch drive.

They include a little leaflet with information on the drive.

The Patriot Ignite is based around an aluminum casing and the product name is easy enough to see, along with the capacity. This drive is 7mm thick which means it is fully compatible with super thin Ultrabooks. It is a screwless case design and quite easy to prise open. Using a flat, thin screwdriver head to get inside only takes a few moments. Just be aware this will invalidate the warranty.

On the front of the PCB is the Phison S10 controller chip. Additionally there is a DRAM chip and four NAND packages. The Phison PS3110-S10 is a 32 bit quad core eight channel SATA III controller. Patriot have adopted 16nm Micron asynchronous MLC NAND. There are eight MLC NAND chips installed, at 64Gb each. After formatting in Windows there is 447GB available.

The DDR3 DRAM cache is a 512MB chip by NANYA, running at 1333mhz.
On this page we present some high resolution images of the product in our studio with a Fuji XT1 camera. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.




For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 3

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OCZ ARC 100 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
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Intel 520 Series 240GB
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Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
OCZ Vector 150 256GB
OCZ Vector 240GB
OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
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Patriot Wildfire 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS
ADATA S510 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter.

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.


Overall performance is strong, although the sequential results in our tests fall a little below the manufacturer claimed specifications. That said, Patriot are using ATTODiskBenchmark for their claimed results and there is often quite a difference between these two programs.

This drive handles compressible and incompressible data equally well, which will help in specific situations, such as when dealing with large video files and images. 512k read performance here is slightly stronger, increasing from 389.2MB/s to 493.5MB/s.


Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.


Read and write performance is excellent – peaking at 563MB/s read and 542MB/s write. These are very close to Patriot's official claims.


Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.


AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data – and the combination of Phison S10 controller and NAND flash scores well. The final overall score of 1,069 points is very strong placing the Patriot Ignite 480GB in the top 10% of drives tested to date.

Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.


IOPS performance is very good and both 4k random write and read score very close to 80k. Again Patriot claims are very close to what we achieved, even though there are different methodologies for measuring IOPS.
I have had many great experiences in the past testing Patriot Solid State drives, including the now iconic Pyro and Wildfire. The 120GB Wildfire drive I reviewed has actually been in one of our older server systems since we published results back in August 2011. So far it has delivered over 500TB of data, and it is still going strong.

When we were offered a new Ignite 480GB to review I jumped at the chance, because for all intents and purposes Patriot have been ‘MIA' for quite some time, focusing all their efforts into devices for the mobile sector. It is good to see them back in action in the enthusiast sector.

The Ignite 480GB is a high performance drive which deals with both compressible and incompressible data very well. Asynchronous NAND is an unusual choice (as many are now using A19 Toggle), although it is clear to see that the latest 16nm Micron NAND is very capable. Overall IOPS performance is also noteworthy.

The Ignite doesn't really exhibit any noticeable weaknesses and our real world tests as a Windows 8.1 boot drive verify that this is a snappy, high performance product. Even though there are only 480GB and 960GB capacities available the Ignite is therefore particularly suitable for file storage and backup, or for use as a high performance STEAM game drive.

Right now the drive is not available in the United Kingdom, although Patriot have assured me that availability is on the horizon. They are working with Amazon and EBuyer to stock the Ignite, Blaze and Torch series of drives. Patriot say the Ignite 480GB will be listed around the £149.99 price point. The ever popular Samsung Evo 840 has recently been reduced in price to £164.00 inc vat, so Patriot seem to be aware of the competition and are targeting accordingly.

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Pros:

• solid all round compressible/incompressible performance.
• good IOPS performance.
• Extensive ECC feature set.
• AES 256 bit encryption support.

Cons:

• facing stiff competition under £200.

Kitguru says: It is good to see Patriot back in action in the SSD sector. The Ignite 480GB delivers excellent performance and pricing looks competitive.

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