Patriot Ignite Solid State Drive Overview
The Patriot Ignite solid state drive is your typical 2.5-inch solid state drive. Patriot has gone with a black metal casing and the front of the drive has a large sticker on it with that lets you know the capacity of the drive.
Flipping the drive over to the back there is another large sticker that lets us know the actual model number and other information. There are also four mounting holes on the bottom of the drive.
The drive is a 7 mm drive so you shouldn’t have a problem fitting it in laptops and other smaller devices. On each side of the drive there are two mounting holes.
Like all 2.5-inch SATA drives you have both SATA data and power connections on the end of the drive.
The casing of the drive actually has no screws on it. This design is something we are seeing on newer solid state drive. We saw it on the Crucial MX200 and Corsair Neutron XT drives. There are a little hard to get open, because of this Patriot provided us with shots of the PCB of the drive.
On the main side of the drive you will find the Phison S10 controller, a DRAM chip and four NAND chips. As we talking about in our Corsair Neutron XT review the Phison PS3110-S10 is a true quad-core controller, with three of its cores exclusively being used for flash management tasks like background garbage collection. There is also end to end data protection between the controller, DRAM cache, and NAND chips. There is also a new Smart ECC technology which is new RAID ECC technology to recover uncorrectable errors. When a page is found faulty and flash ECC protection fails to recover the uncorrectable errors, the defective page will be reconstructed by the Smart ECC engine.
Where the Corsair Neutron XT went with Toshiba’s A19 toggle NAND Patriot has gone with Micron’s 16nm asynchronous MLC NAND. Typically we see synchronous and toggle mode NAND perform better than asynchronous NAND so as we get into test we will see the results. There are four NAND chips on the main side of the drive and four more on the back. Each NAND chip is 64 GB.
