Patriot Ignite 480GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

It has been quite a while since we had any of Patriot’s drives on our test bench and it is as such a pleasure to be able to put the 480GB capacity Patriot Ignite through the paces. The Patriot Ignite is available in several versions and capacities, both M.2 and 2.5-inch form factors and it is also available in various capacities.

Patriot named the drive Ignite because that is its goal, to ignite and enhance your computers performance. The more traditional form factor and SATA3 connection makes it compatible with almost any system and would be a great upgrade from a traditional mechanical disk drive.

The drive measures 7mm in height and that also makes it perfect for ultrabooks and laptops that usually are limited to that height in their 2.5-inch drives. Patriot’s Ignite 2.5-inch SSD comes in two large sizes that provide plenty of space from a single drive: 480GB and 960GB.

The Ignite doesn’t just offer a lot of capacity, it also offers great transfer speeds. The drive series is rated for up to 560MB/s while reading and 545MB/s while writing. The random performance is equally impressive with 80K IOPS while reading and 75K IOPS while writing.

The Patriot Ignite doesn’t just come in a traditional form factor, the same goes for the design. The drive itself is packed inside a black enclosure and it features a sticker on each side. The top shows the drive name and company logo as well as the capacity while the bottom sticker  shows pretty much the same information on a white sticker.

Feature wise the drive packs everything you’ll want. You got the basic TRIM and Advanced Garbage Collection, but the drive also feature Smart ECC that’s able to recover 115bits/2KB, end-to-end data path protection (ETEP), and Advanced wear leveling together with Smart Refresh. Overall a feature list that should make sure that the drive runs stable for a long time.

Inside the drive, we find a short PCB featuring the Phison S10 series controller paired with MLC NAND for a great performance. The 480GB model that I’m taking a closer look at today features 512MB DRAM Cache while its bigger brother with 960GB capacity features a full GB of cache.

The Patriot Ignite is backed by a 3-year warranty and has a mean time before failure rating of 2 million hours. It sure sounds like a great drive, so lets put it to the test.

Features

• Phison S10 Series SSD Processor paired with qualified MLC NAND flash for best performance value and reliability
• DRAM Cache: 480GB = 512MB
• 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
• Operating Temperature – 0° ~ 70°C
• Native Command Queuing (NCQ) – Up to 32 commands
• ECC Recovery: Up to 115bits/2KB
• MTBF: 2,000,000 hours

Packaging

The Patriot Ignite comes in a beautiful blue box that showcases the important features on the front as well as the drive itself through a window in the packaging.

The rear of the package features a few more information and more details on each.

Inside the package isn’t much besides the drive itself. There is a small install guide, but no other accessories.