Patriot Burst Review

Patriot Memory has sent us for Patriot Burst Review. Today, we will be taking a look at their 120GB SSD with the branding of Burst series. The Burst series of SSDs come in the capacities of 120GB and 240GB.

Patriot Memory Burst 120GB SSD Review

The Burst series of SSDs have SATA III 6Gb/s interface with backward compatibility with SATA III 3Gb/s. These drives are using Phison S11 series controller so we are expecting good performance on these. Burst series SSDs offer up to 560MB/s read speeds and 540 MB/s write speeds. With all these numbers on the paper, the Patriot is trying to offer the best value to the user who would want to experience the blazing fast speeds of the SSDs yet remaining budget friendly.

• Product:               Patriot Burst Review
• Manufacturer:      Patriot Memory
• Brand:                  Burst
• Availability:         Texon Ware
• Price:                   Check Price on Amazon

120GB SSD Specifications

Capacity	120GB
Interface	SATAT III 6 Gb/s
Cache	32MB
MTBF	2,000,000 hrs
Connector Type	22-pin Serial ATA
Storage Interface	Serial ATA-600
Form Factor	2.5”
Data Rate	Up to 560MB/s Read and up to 540MB/s write
Operating Temperature	0 ~ 70°C
Dimension	2.7” X 3.9” X 0.3”
Weight	2.77 Oz
Power Consumption	Idle: 0.3W, Read: 1.3W, Write: 2W
Warranty	3 Years
Certification	CE/FCC/RoHS
OS Support	Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, Linus and Mac OS
Storage Temperature	-40°C ~ 85°C
Operating Shock	1500G (@ 0.5msec half sine wave)
Vibration	20G Peak, (80 ~ 2000Hz)
Humidity	0°C ~ 40°C / 93% RH, 72 Hours
Data Reliability	LDPC
Operating Voltage	5V

Patriot Burst SSD Review Packaging and Unboxing

The storage drive comes in a standard cardboard packing of blue and white colors. On the front side, we have a Patriot brand name printed on the right side. Burst branding is printed on the top left side. 2.5” SATA III 6 Gb/s SSD is printed on the left side. Salient features are highlighted on the left side of the cutout section. The drive has 7mm height making it a low profile design. It is compatible with the Windows and Mac OS.

We can clearly see the top side of the SSD through the cutout section. The backside of the packaging box has a P logo on the top left side which is a registered trademark of the Patriot Memory. Burst 2.5” SATA III 6Gb/s SSD is printed on the left side under the P logo. There is a picture of the drive on the right side. Salient features like 7mm Low Profile, 2.5” form factor, SATA III 6Gb/s are highlighted as well. Serial no sticker is pasted on the bottom right side.

Patriot Memory is offering 3 years warranty on the Burst series SSDs. The drive is made in Taiwan. Company contact info and social media presence info are printed on the bottom left side. The opening cover of the SSD box has the company’s website address printed on it. Company’s contact info for various regions is printed on the opposite cover side. The left and the right sides have white color background with P logo printed at the bottom.

Patriot Memory Burst SSD Review Closer Look

The Patriot Memory Burst 120GB has a form factor of 2.5”. It has a height of 7mm making it a low profile design making it suitable for use in PCs as well as in the notebooks. Here is what the Patriot Memory has to say about it, “The Patriot Burst Solid State Drive (SSD) is a perfect way to enhance the computer performance. Burst offers transfer speeds at up to 560MB/s read and 540 MB/s write to eliminate bottlenecks.

A SATA III 6Gb/s interface that is backward compatible with SATA III 3Gb/s, this patriot burst review provides greater performance over traditional HDDs. At an only 7mm high in a 2.5” form factor, the Burst is perfect for any Ultrabook or laptop upgrade. Patriot Burst SSDs come in comes in two sizes for every user, at 120GB and 240GB.

With the Burst, the Patriot has continued pricing very aggressively to offer one of the best price-per-performance ratios on the market. Backed by Patriot’s award winning build quality and 3-year warranty; the Patriot Burst will deliver on the most reliable choices in SSDs.”

Let’s take a look at the drive. The drive’s chassis has a black matte finish with a blue color sticker on the top side. Patriot brand name is printed on the top right side of the sticker. Burst is printed in a light blue color in a vertical layout on the left side. 120GB 2.5” Solid State Drive SATA II 6Gb/s  is printed on the bottom left side of the sticker. P logo is printed on the bottom right side.

There is a white color sticker pasted on the backside covering the screws that are needed to be removed to access the actual PCB. Due to the restriction from our source, we did not open the drive. Patriot brand name is printed on the top side of the sticker. Burst PBU120GS25SSDR PE000541 is printed on the top left side of this sticker. Removing this seal/sticker would void the warranty.

The company’s website address is printed on the bottom left side. The drive is made in Taiwan. The drive has a standard 7-pin Information signal segment/port and 15-pin power segment/port on it. The space between upper two mounting holes is 61,72mm. The drive has 4 M3 x 0.5-6H with full threaded 3mm golden screw mounting holes.

The distance between the two mounting holes on the length of the SSD is 76.60mm. The width of the SSD is 69.85 ± 0.25mm whereas the length of the SSD is 99.99 ± 0.25mm with the height of 6.90mm. There are no accessories included with the SSD but a handy user guide.

The Patriot Burst 120GB is using the Phison S11 series controller which is a budget solution for the SSD chips, though we were not able to find out the exact model as we did not open the drive. Which is why it was hard to determine if the drive is using TLC or MLC chip. The power-sipping two-channel controller of Phison S11 is capable of DRAM-less operations that would be helpful in lower production cost and lowering power consumption of the SSDs.

Patriot is using 32MB Cache in their Burst SSDs which is clearly indicating that Patriot is not relying on the Phison S11’s capability of the driving the SSD in a DRAM-less environment. Even, the use of 32MB SDR cache would actually explain the driver’s relatively slow performance in our real-life testing. But, this is not a major complaint given the price of this patriot burst review though in this price bracket the competition is really stiff with almost very limited augmentation in features that could make one solution stand out.

This is exactly what we are seeing with this drive. Speaking of features, this drive is capable of Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management, Low Power Management, Trim Support, and Smart Zip. In addition, this drive has LDPC error correction which helps in the NAND reliability.

In terms of data throughput, this drive is capable of up to 560MB/s read and 540Mb/s write using the ATTO disk benchmark. Up to 330MB/s read and 270 MB/s write using the Crystal Disk Mark. Please, keep in mind these figures and corresponding software when evaluating the drive’s performance which would otherwise confuse the user.

4K Random Read and Write speeds are rated at up to 50K IOPS and 40k IOPS respectively using the IOMeter. We will try to validate these speeds in synthetic benchmarks as well as put the SSD through real-life data copying.

120GB Patriot Burst SSD Review Testing

We have tested this patriot burst review on the X99 platform. The test bench setup is as follow:

• Intel i7 6850k
• Asus Rampage V Edition 10
• Ballistix Elite 4x4GB 3000MHz DDR4
• Noctua NH-U14S
• Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD [OS Drive]
• Seagate 2TB Barracuda
• Colorful iGame GTX 1050Ti
• Corsair AX1200i

To test the drive’s read and write speeds, we have used following software running on Microsoft Windows 10 x64 build version 16299:

• AS SSD 1.8.5636.37293
• ATTO Disk Benchmark 3.05
• CrystalDiskMark 6
• Anvil Pro Storage Utilities 1.1.0
• PCMark

Let’s take a look at the results. Crystal Disk Mark has resulted in sequential read to be 338 MB/s which is above the rated 330MB/s sequential read speed of the drive. The tested sequential write speed was 294.5MB/s which is above the rated write speed of 270MB/s. Random read and write speeds decent as well. The sequential read/write speeds have been validated on the Crystal Disk Mark.

Next, we run the AS SSD software to test the performance of the drive. The tested read speed was 316.61MB/s which is approximately 4.24% below the rated speed of the 330MB/s. The tested write speed was 276.54MB/s validating the write speed. Next, we ran the AS SSD Compression Benchmark. The write speed started at 240MB/s approximately.

There were continuous ups and downs along the graph line with lowest write speed of 80MB/s and as high as 500MB/s. No dips were observed after 70 percentile. The read speed, on the other hand, has shown consistency on the entire run of the test with marginal ups and downs. It started at approximately 290MB/s and goes as high as 520MB/s. The fluctuation and that many drops can be attributed to the slow cache of the SSD.

Next, we ran the AS SSD Copy Benchmark. For compressed files, the speed was 223.17MB/s with a duration of 4.81s. Generally, we would like to have high speeds with less duration. Speed for Programs was 74.82MB/s with the duration of 18.80s. For Game files, the speed was 79.42MB/s with the duration of 17.39s. This is a fairly decent performance.

Next, we ran the ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the drive’s performance. On the default transfer length of 256MB with a complete range of transfer size, the read speed started to cross 400MB/s mark from 8KB transfer size. Whereas the drive started crossing the 500MB/s above the 32KB transfer size. For the transfer size of above 32KB there was a consistent read and write performance validating the rated 560MB/s read and 540MB/s write speeds.

Next, we set the transfer length to the size of 2GB and ran the benchmark with the complete range of transfer size. The performance was consistently same as was on the 256MB. Similar performance was observed on the 32GB transfer length. Even with increased queue depth, the performance was consistent.

Next, we ran the Anvil Storage Utilities benchmark to test the performance of the drive. On the default test size of 1GB, the tested read speed was 270.26MB/s with 14.80s of response time. The write speed was 240.04MB/s with 16.6641s response time. The tested Random Read speed was 50012.17 IOPS validating the rated Random Read Speed of 50k IOPS.

This was with the Queue Depth of 16. With Queue Depth of 4, the Random Read Speed was 19857.28 IOPS. The tested Random Write speed was 47768.16 IOPS on the Queue Depth of 4 whereas it was 67126.56 IOPS with the Queue Depth of 16. The rated Random Write speed of 40k IOPS is validated as well. Response time for Random read and write was fairly good as well.

Next, we ran the PCMark benchmark on the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. The Storage 2.0 score comes to be 4687 with the bandwidth of 118.83MB/s. This was the only test validating our real-life testing of this patriot burst review. The response time for gaming ranged from 60.9s to 139.3s. Adobe Photoshop response time ranged from 120.4s to 410.1s. The lowest time was for the Microsoft Powerpoint with 9.6s. It was 10s for the Microsoft Excel and 29.4s for the Word.

Next, we put the drive in data copying test on our test bench using real-life data. The time for the data transfer was taken using stopwatch and we did not use the windows reported time for this purpose. First, we transferred the data set comprising of 1948 files of different sizes with a total size of the data set to be 11GB from HDD to the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. This graph shows the data writing speeds and the time taken to write the files to the SSD under review.

It took 169 seconds to copy the complete data set to the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. The average data writing speed was 147MB/s with the maximum being 198MB/s. There were quite dips in the write speeds. The lowest was 57MB/s. This is a decent performance and one needs to take into consideration the possible bottleneck being the slow speed of the HDD.

Next, we copy this data set to the Seagate 2TB HDD and Samsung 840 EVO SSD to test the read performance of the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. It took 98 seconds to transfer the 11GB of the data to the HDD and 60 seconds to the Samsung SSD. The average speed for the HDD was 190MB/s and 200MB/s for the Samsung SSD. Minimum speed was 67MB/s for the HDD and 85MB/s for the Samsung SSD.

Then we took 5 files ensuring that minimum size of each file was 2GB. The total size of this data set was 12.3GB. We copied the data from the Seagate 2TB Barracuda to the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. Below graph shows the result.

It took 149 seconds to copy this data from the HDD to the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD. Maximum write speed was 186MB/s with the minimum being 61.4MB/s and average speed being 70MB/s. Next, we copied the data from the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD to the Samsung 840 Evo 250GB SSD and the Seagate 2TB Barracuda HDD one by one. Below graph shows the result.

As expected, it took less time to copy the data on to the SSD than the HDD and copying rate was higher for the SSD than the HDD. It took 47 seconds to copy this data set to the Samsung SSD as compared to the 90 seconds needed for the HDD. Average copying speed for the Samsung SSD was 290MB/s as compared to the 130MB/s for the HDD.

Maximum speed was 520MB/s for the SSD and 285MB/s for the HDD. These high speeds for momentarily at the start of the copying task. Minimum speed was 125MB/s for the SSD and 113MB/s for the HDD. This is evident that bottleneck was not from the Patriot Burst 120GB SSD but from the slow write speed of the HDD.

The last step of our testing was to uncompress the 3.33GB file on to the Samsung 840 Evo 250GB SSD and Seagate 2TB Barracuda HDD. Below graph shows the result. There was not much of a difference in both. It took 32 seconds to uncompress this data on to the SSD and 36 seconds on to the HDD.

Conclusion

With Burst line up of the SSDs, the Patriot Memory is trying to bring the fast storage solution at wallet-friendly pricing. Hence, their price-to-performance ratio is making these drives a better value for the users. We were sent a 120GB SSD for the review. The drive is following the SATA III 6Gb/s interface which is backward compatible with the SATA III 3Gb/s with Serial ATA-600 interfacing. It has a 22-pin Serial ATA connector with 7-pins for the information signal and 15-pins for the power signal.

The drive is a 2.5” form factor with the dimension of the 2.7” X 2.9” X 0.3”. It has a height of 7mm making it a low profile design. Its power consumption is rated at 0.3W on idling, 2.0W on writing and 1.3W on reading. Operating temperature is rated between 0 ~ 70°C. Its weight is 2.77 Oz. The storage temperature rating is -40°C to 85°C making it able to withstand any harsh environment.

The operating shock is 1500G (@ 0.5msec half sine wave) with Vibration rating being 20G Peak, (80 ~ 2000Hz). Humidity rating is 0°C ~ 40°C / 93% RH, 72 Hours. It is using 5V operating Voltage. The drive has 4 M3 x 0.5-6H with full threaded 3mm golden screw mounting holes. The distance between the two mounting holes on the length of the SSD is 76.60mm. The width of the SSD is 69.85 ± 0.25mm whereas the length of the SSD is 99.99 ± 0.25mm with the height of 6.90mm. There are no accessories included with the SSD but a handy user guide.

The Patriot Burst 120GB is using the Phison S11 series controller which is a budget solution for the SSD chips, though we were not able to find out the exact model as we did not open the drive due to the limitation from the source. Patriot is using 32MB Cache in their Burst SSDs which is clearly indicating that Patriot is not relying on the Phison S11’s capability of the driving the SSD in a DRAM-less environment.

Speaking of features, this patriot burst review drive is capable of Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management, Low Power Management, Trim Support, and Smart Zip. In addition, this drive has LDPC error correction which helps in the NAND reliability. In terms of data throughput, this drive is capable of up to 560MB/s read and 540Mb/s write using the ATTO disk benchmark. Up to 330MB/s read and 270 MB/s write using the Crystal Disk Mark. Please, keep in mind these figures and corresponding software when evaluating the drive’s performance which would otherwise confuse the user. 4K Random Read and Write speeds are rated at up to 50K IOPS and 40k IOPS respectively using the IOMeter.

We are thankful to the Patriot Memory Pakistan for giving us the opportunity to review their Burst 120GB SSD.

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