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As with other SSDs, we reviewed the 240GB version of the Patriot WildFire, which may or may not offer the same performance as other capacities. Most likely, however, different capacities of the same series should provide the same performance. And the Patriot WildFire offered mixed performance in our testing.
In copy tests, which are the tests that show the performance mostly of the drive, the WildFire was comparatively slow. When used as the secondary drive in the system, it scored 202MBps, compared with the 260.71MBps of the Vertex 3 or the 261MBps of the Plextor PX-256M2S . When used as the main drive that hosted the operating system of the test system, the drive's data transfer speed, now representing both the reading and write speed of the drive, reduced to 99.72MBps. Again, this number was slowest among all SATA 3-based SSDs we've reviewed. Compared to hard drives, however, these numbers still showed a huge performance gain.
On the other hand, in tests that involved applications' performance, the WildFire showed the most performance gain amongst all SSDs we've seen. In Office Performance test, where we time how long the computer take to finish a comprehensive set of different concurrent tasks including Word, Excel, file transferring and compression, the WildFire helped the system reduced to time needed to just 365 seconds, compared to 393 seconds in the case of the Crucial M4. Similarly, in our Multimedia MultiTasking test, which gauges the computer's performance when it converts a hi-def movie from one format to another while iTunes is doing a heavy job of music conversion in the background, WildFire scored 278 seconds, by far the shortest on the charts.
The Patriot WildFire, like all SSDs, helped the system take a very short time to boot up and shut down, just 30 and 7.5 seconds, respectively, in our tests. Note that the boot time includes the time the test machines go through the hardware initialization, which already takes about 15 seconds. Compared to when the system uses a hard drive as the main storage drive, the amount of time required for booting up and shutting down is cut down by about one third.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
 |
MMT | |
Office |
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
|
Shutdown | |
Boot Time |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|
As secondary drive | |
As OS drive |
Service and support
Patriot backs the WildFire with a three-year warranty, which is decent and standard for most SSDs, though not as generous as the five-year warranty of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G . At the company's Web site, there's scant content, generally support information for all Patriot's products. At the time of the review, there's no page dedicated to the WildFire.
Conclusion
We were let down by the Patriot WildFire file transfer speed but were happy with its application performance. If you can afford the hefty price, it'll make a very good replacement drive for any computer, be it a laptop or a desktop, and will offer significant performance gain.
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