Patriot Inferno Overview
The Inferno solid state drive looks like most solid state drives we have reviewed. It is very small and has the 2.5-inch form factor. It has an aluminum house, but unlike other drives the housing is red, which sets the Inferno apart from other drives. On the front of the drive there is a sticker that tells us there is an Inferno 120GB drive.
The back of the drive is all plain except some markings towards the bottom of the drive. Like a normal SATA drive the Inferno has standard SATA power and data connections.
Now here is the fun part, opening the drive. To open the drive all you have to do is remove 4 screws on the back of the drive and slide the back off. When you open the drive you can see the PCB inside. At the center is the SandForce controller, more specifically the SF-1222TA3-SBH chip. This is the same chip that has been in every other SandForce-based drive we have reviewed over the past year. Around the SandForce chip are 8 8GB NAND chips.
If you remove 4 more screws you can completely remove the PCB and flip it over to see the 8 more 8GB NAND chips. These NAND chips are the Intel Intel 29F64G08CAMDB flash NAND chips. Of course 16 x 8GB is 128GB, so why is this a 120GB drive. That is because 7% of the storage is left for over-provisioning.
