Wildfire Overview
The Wildfire drive looks like your basic 2.5-inch solid state drive. It does have a nice aluminum casing, which I did point out in the unboxing video. On the front there is a sticker that lets you know this is a Patriot Wildfire drive and that it is 120GB.
On the back of the drive there is another sticker that has all of the serial numbers on it. Just like any other solid state drive you have the SATA power and data connections. Also when checking out the drive I noticed a nice silver trim around the casing, it gives the drive a good look.
I know you want to see what is inside this drive so let’s go ahead and void our warranty and open the drive up! Patriot makes this a little harder than other solid state drives. Instead of using screws they use 4 hex bolts on the top of the drive. Remove those and you can get inside the drive. Remember if you open the drive you are voiding your warranty. Upon opening the drive I was surprised to see a single chip on the PCB. This chip is of course the SandForce SF-2281 drive controller. The rest of this side of the PCB is plain because it is a lower capacity drive and the NAND chips are on the other side of the drive.
Flipping the PCB over we can see 8 16GB Toshiba 32nm MLC NAND chips. These chips are specifically the TH58TAG7D2FBA89 chip. With 8 chips at 16GB that gives you a total of 128GB of storage, 120GB is used so the extra 8GB is used for over-provisioning.
