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.