Patriot Pyro SE 120GB review

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Verdict:

Fast and reasonably priced, but you'll need SATA3 to get the most from it

Review Date: 2 Dec 2011

Price when reviewed: £160

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Solid state disks (SSDs) are much faster than standard hard disks, but they're also far more expensive. One way of getting some of the benefits of an SSD is to use a small capacity model, like the 120GB Patriot Pyro SE, as your PC's boot disk and store your files on a standard hard disk.

The Pyro SE has the latest SATA3 interface, and we were blown away by its performance in our file transfer tests. It wrote large files at 169MB/s and read them at a blistering 360MB/s. Small files were written at 75MB/s and read at 58MB/s, which is average for an SSD.

The Pyro's write speeds can't match the latest top-of-the-range SSDs, but its read speeds put many more expensive alternatives to shame, so using it as a system disk will reduce Windows 7 boot times as well as how long your PC takes to resume from sleep and hibernation.

The Pyro still costs more per gigabyte than any hard disk at £1.33 per gigabyte, but it's good value for an SSD. It's a great buy if you want the benefits of solid state storage without spending a fortune.

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