Unboxing & Review: Patriot Blast SSD 120GB

As the competition heated up among the SSD manufacturers, the once considered unnecessary luxury item has now become a need for those who is able to stretch out a little extra budget to enjoy the high speed storage device at the price as low as RM200 to RM300 for a decent 120GB SSD.

In today's review, we will be examining the 120GB Patriot Blast SSD, special thanks to Patriot Memory Malaysia for making this review possible. The 120GB Patriot Blast SSD retails at a very affordable price of RM 229 but before jumping straight to the conclusion, let us find out how well will it perform here in the Tech Critter's lab!

Specifications

• Phison S10 Series Controller
• DRAM Cache: 120GB and 240GB = 256 MB| 480GB = 512MB | 960GB = 1024MB
• SATA3 6Gbps/SATA2 3Gbps
• TRIM support (O/S dependent
• End-to-end data path protection (ETEP)
• Advanced Garbage Collection
• Smart ECC
• Smart Refresh
• Operating Temperature – 0° ~ 70°C
• Native Command Queuing (NCQ) – Up to 32 commands
• ECC Recovery: Up to 120bits/2KB
• MTBF: 2,000,000 hours
• 4K Aligned Random Read: 100K IOPs
• 4K Aligned Random Write: 120GB = 14K IOPs | 240GB = 23K IOPs | 480GB = 32K IOP s | 960GB = 38K IOPs
• Sequential Read & Write Transfer: Up to 560MB/s Read120GB: Up to 425MB/s Write | 240GB: Up to 530MB/s Write
• 480GB and 960GB: Up to 540MB/s Write
• *Based on ATTO
• O/S Support: Windows® XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / Mac® OS / Linux

Unboxing

At the front of the box you'll find a cutout that is intended to display the actual product to any potential buyers that came across. Some basic information of the SSD can be found at the front of the box, i.e 7mm thickness, uses SATA III ( 6.0 Gb/s ), 2.5" form factor.

The very same information can be found at the back of the box, though there's a little add on, showing that the Patriot Blast SSD is covered by a 3-year limited warranty. Though, the drawback of the packaging is that there's no traces of technical specifications of the Patriot Blast found on the box. This can be a problem as  there are users who took it to heart when it comes to buying something, having no further details of the product could potentially draw them away.

The content of the box is pretty simple and straight forward, not flashy accessories but the Patriot Blaze SSD and user's guide - that's pretty much what you'll get from almost every brand at this price range.

At the front of the SSD, you'll find its label sticker that gives it its identity, a 120GB Patriot Blast SSD it is!

The Patriot Blast is a rather odd one, no screws were found on the back of the SSD; which  makes taking apart the Patriot Blase SSD a task that is virtually impossible.  

Testing Method

Test Rig Configuration
CPU Cooler	be quiet! Pure Rock
CPU	Intel Core i7 4770K
Motherboard	ASUS Maximus Gene VI
Memory	Kingston HyperX Savage 16GB DDR3
Primary Hard Drive	Kimtigo KTA-350 120GB
Power Supply	be quiet! Straight Power 10 600W
Chassis	Vector Benchcase

Synthetic Benchmarks

AS SSD Benchmark

Widely used SSD benchmarking utility that uses incompressible data to simulate the worst possible scenario for a SSD and thus giving a much lower sequential read and write speed result than what has been stated by the manufacturer as result of the heavy workload.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The most frequently used benchmarking utility by many manufacturers for performance specification. As ATTO Disk Benchmark uses compressible data rather than compressible data, it results in higher benchmark scores. We've ran the benchmark with transfer size ranged from 0.5KB to 8192KB and total length of the test to be 256MB.

CrystalDiskMark

Developed by a Japanese coder that goes by the nickname Hiyohiyo, CrystalDiskMark is one of the most frequent used SSD Benchmark utility to measure SSD's read and write performance. There's 2 option for the test data used, compressible (0 fill) and incompressible (1 fill).

Real World Usage
We've ran several test that with several SSD with at least 40% capacity occupied with various commonly used software to simulate the real world scenario. 

The overall performance of the Patriot Blast is pretty good as from what we can see from result populated in the graph above. It's not the fastest SSD among these SSD tested but it's definitely not the slowest either; with reading performance that comes pretty close to both the Kingmax SMP35 Client and the Crucial M500 which cost more than the Patriot Blast itself.  

Final Thoughts

On aesthetic aspects, the Patriot Blast isn't one attractive looking SSD with the rather plain looking enclosure and stickers, but as we look further on the price over performance ratio, the Patriot Blast is right on the sweet spot of it. With SRP of RM 229, the Patriot Blast is the real bang for the buck SSD if you're on a tight budget for SSD and not willing to sacrifice the performance just because the cheapest offer you can get turns out the be an underperforming SSD that doesn't even worth buying at all.

Pros

• Very good pricing
• Comes with 3 year warranty
• Balanced performance

Cons

• No extra accessories provided 
• No technical specifications on the box