Even after our LAN this weekend I’m not burnt out on all of the storage talk, so it is only fitting that I continue our streak of SSD reviews. Today I have a drive from Patriot in the office. Specifically their new Ignite in a 480GB capacity. The Ignite is one of three recently introduced drives from Patriot with this being their flagship drive. The Ignite features the same Phison's quad-core, eight-channel PS3110-S10 controller that we also saw on the Mushkin Striker last week so we know just how well it can perform. This is fitting because both Patriot and Mushkin focus on bringing the best possible performance at the best possible price. So today I’m going to run the Ignite though our benchmark suite and see how it compares to everything I have tested recently and then see how good of a deal the drive is as well. Could this be the SSD for your next build? Let’s find out.

Product Name: Patriot Ignite 480GB

Review Sample Provided by: Patriot

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

For packaging on the Ignite, Patriot went well and above what we have been seeing from a lot of other manufactures. Not only did they box up the drive but they included a window on the box to give the best of both worlds. From front of the box Has a little bit of general information along the side of the drive along with the Patriot and Ignite branding up top. On the back we have a photo of the drive in color along with a shirt paragraph on the drive. They also highlight the same features from the front but this time they include a little more information. Personally I don’t really consider most to be features though. Mentioning the performance or the controller would be better features IMO.

Inside the drive comes in a plastic tray. Along with it you get a small guide on the drive as well.

Our Testing Procedures and Test Rig

Photos and Breakdown

So the Ignite has a standard metal shell but with the same rough black finish that I also saw on the Striker last week. I love the black nd red sticker on top here though. It has a little style and isn’t focused on having all of the serial numbers and other certification logos that Mushkin packed onto the sticker of the Striker. Here we have the Patriot and Ignite branding as well as the capacity.

The drive is 7mm thick like just about every drive these days. This helps with compatibility with some of the thin Ultrabooks and other devices while still fitting in any PC case that supports 2.5 inch drives. Then of course we have the SATA 3 data connection as well as a SATA power connection.

Unlike the other drives this week the Ignite does have something going on here on the bottom. To keep the top clean they used a second sticker on the bottom to get all of the required certification logos and model and serial numbers. For mounting the drive has the standard bottom and side mounts.

To get into the Ignite I had to bust out my flat head screwdriver again, just like on the Striker. This is interesting because most drives use screws to hold the casing together, but this design was just snapped together. With that I also was able to get into the drive without having to break any warranty stickers as well.

Once into the Ignite things really start to get interesting though. For starters the PCB isn’t installed with screws at all, just like the Mushkin Striker that I covered last week. Once I noticed that I started to notice other similarities. In fact short of part of the serial number on the NAND, you wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart when sitting next to each other. The Ignite uses the same exact Phison PS3110-S10 controller and  the same Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. That means we get the same eight channels on the controller because of its 32 bit quad core. With that we can also expect similar performance as well, but that isn’t a bad thing at all.

Performance

So with the Ignite being extremely similar in design to the Striker we have an idea of what to expect for performance. That said numbers do the talking and to do that I had to run the Ignite through our standard benchmark suite. To start things off I run through CrystalDiscMark both on read and write speeds. No surprises here, the Ignite came in almost spot on with Striker. This means we saw top of the chart performance on the sequential reads, at 512k the Chronos pulled ahead slightly. At 4K QD32 it also matched the Striker and like the Striker is slightly lower than the OCZ drives. For write speed sequential and 512k speeds are at the top of the charts as well, exactly like the Striker. 4K QD32 results are well below what I saw from the high end OCZ drives like the Vertex 450 but are still very respectable. 

In AS SSD the results are impressive but the Striker pulled ahead here for some reason. That said the results are still faster than almost everything else tested.

Running through the application simulations in Passmark’s advanced disk benchmark I saw great performance in the web server application but serious slowdowns in the file server benchmarks. The Striker and Chronos performed similarly but the OCZ and Corsair drives put up numbers two and three times faster. 

In PCMark 8 our numbers put the Ignite in just below the Striker and well above the Chronos, this is similar to what I saw in most of the other benchmarks so no surprises here.

In our latest benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities I ran through and tested 4K QD16 IOPS on both the read and writes. The Ignite pulled well ahead here, even well ahead of the Striker. Here we can really see the performance difference between getting a high end drive like the Ignite over a budget drive like the Chronos.

Overall and Final Verdict

Well from the beginning I was excited to see what Patriot has been up too, for the most part we haven’t covered their drives in a long time. Right out of the hole I was really digging how the drive looks. It did have the same basic steel casing that the Striker had, but Patriot was careful to hide most of the info on the underside of the drive and put a nice looking sticker up top. When I dug into the drive I noticed that the Ignite seems to be the same drive as the Striker. That isn’t a big deal, the Striker did perform well for us. So is wasn’t a surprise when the drive performed really well in a lot of the benchmarks. The same goes for the really weak 4K 32QD results as well. Being a  Phison's PS3110-S10 drive the Ignite also gets the end to end data path protection that will help prevent small data loss when going through the drive before the data is hardened in the NAND. This helps keep things running quick, data loss means having to run the same bit a second time.

My only other concern with the Ignite was with its 3 year warranty. I would personally prefer to see SSDs have a 5 year warranty although I do upgrade within that 3 year window typically. So where does the Ignite fall price wise? Well the Striker was seriously impressive with both its price and performance and the Ignite comes in at the exact same price point currently. That makes this a great buy. I think the biggest decision you are going to run into at this capacity currently is if you want to get the Ignite or the Striker. It is completely a preference call, personally I would go with the drive that matches my build better.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.