Patriot Inferno 100GB Solid State Drive Review

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By now, there should be no doubt that SandForce’s SF-1222 is certainly on a roll as it seems every one of the major players is scrambling to release a solid state drive based on this powerful controller. Of course, they all have good reason to as the SandForce’s latest and greatest offers the perfect combination of price and performance. Indeed, it can be considered one of the best MLC NAND controllers out there. Today we are going to take a look Patriot version: namely the Inferno 100GB solid state drive.

It certainly has been awhile since we looked at a Patriot drive as they seemed to have spurned the mid-tier (usually Indilinx based) drive niche and have focused instead on the more enthusiast end of the spectrum. This certainly is a viable business strategy, as it is better to focus somewhat limited resources on one or two drives and make them the best you can rather than try and release a hundred different ones. When it comes to Patriot and the enthusiast community they really need no introduction as they have been providing enthusiast grade products at a more value orientated price for years now.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Sandforce-based drives as of late as their latest production firmware does cap performance in order to protect some of their customers. We won’t get into the politics of this at this point but some manufacturers like G.Skill have come up with innovative ways to circumvent this limitation while others like Corsair decided to stick with a modified version of the pre-production firmware. The Inferno on the other hand uses the standard mass production firmware so it will be interesting to see if they found a way to circumvent the blocks within the latest firmware revision.

On the warranty front, the last flagship model we looked at from Patriot, the Torqx 128GB came with an astonishing 10 year warranty, the Inferno (also a flagship drive) only comes with a 5 year warranty. This certainly is puzzling so we are going to be paying close attention to the components used in this drive to make sure that no corners were cut that would explain this.

When it comes to the Inferno, availability is limited but is available at select retailers and e-tailers throughout North America. Even though availability is less than that of some of the other SandForce based drives we have looked at, the Inferno actually comes in with a slightly more reasonable price point of about $385. This still does place it in the enthusiast end of the price spectrum but if it performs as well as the others, Patriot just may end up having the better value-orientated price.

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Specifications

Specifications

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Packaging and Accessories

Packaging and Accessories

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The Patriot Inferno’s shipping container is certainly on the large end of the spectrum. The box is not overly deep but it has height and girth to spare. Since the drive inside is obviously the same size as all past drives we have looked at this means that this box should have some down right huge crumple zones that will absorb a heck of a lot of punishment. Unfortunately, while this box is large and there is more then enough room to include detail specifications on the back, including performance numbers, Patriot opted to not include any detailed information. Nonetheless, there is also mention of the included 3.5 drive bay adapter.

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When you open the box up you are greeted with the exact same internal packaging scheme as we saw on all previous Patriot solid state drives; albeit in a new “large sized” format. Basically, this monster of a box has two internal compartments separated by a built-in cardboard divider. The back area is for the accessories (which we will get to in a moment) and the front area where a plastic clam shell holder further protects the Inferno drive from damage.

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Moving on to the accessories we can see that Patriot has continued their tradition of including a 3.5” adapter plate. While this is not as noteworthy with the Inferno as it was with the Torqx as the Inferno is just one of many to have this nifty little accessory come standard. However, it still is nice to see it included. Many (if not most) of these drives are not going to end up in laptops or other devices which use the 2.5” form factor and are in fact going to end up in all sorts of PC cases which take 3.5” drives. We really are glad to see what was considered noteworthy last generation is now only “par for the course” with this generation drives.

 

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A Closer Look at the Patriot Inferno 100GB

A Closer Look at the Patriot Inferno 100GB

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The Patriot Inferno is easily the most striking solid states drive we have seen. The rich, glossy candy apple red really colour scheme is perfect for a drive called Inferno but just take into account that a colour scheme like this may clash with other components in your case.

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As expected the PCB and the layout of the chips is extremely similar to that of previous SandForce based drives we have looked. In fact, this PCB is a dead ringer for the PCB found in the G.Skill Phoenix drive. All in all, you get: 16 flash chips (8 per side laid out in a C configuration) and one centrally located SandForce controller chip but no cache chip as no SandForce drive needs one. It is interesting to note that just like other consumer solid state drives we have looked at the Inferno does not have an on board supercapacitor to ensure all data is written to the NAND in case of power loss nor is there a spot on the PCB for one.

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Also as expected, the Inferno uses the SandForce SF1200 (full model name is SF-1222TA3-SBH ) controller and not the SF1500 which would have been found on the now defunct OCZ Vertex 2 Pro. The SF1500 is actually a server orientated controller whereas the SF1200 is one which is geared towards the mass market end of things. In either case, this is a SATA revision 2, 3GB/s controller which supports native command queuing (NCQ), TRIM support and S.M.A.R.T (albeit SSD Smart and not exactly HDD Smart). The heart of the SF1200 is a licensed Tensilica Diamond Core 570T CPU which is a 32bit RISC processor. However, the SF1200 is more than just a 570T as this is just the building block upon which the 1200 is built and is only one small part of what makes the SF1200 an SF1200.

It is unfortunate that SandForce is not very open about the specifications of their products as it is unclear how much on board cache this controller has. At the very least there is probably a few megabytes of on board cache. By keeping the cache on the chip it allows the controller to be much more efficient as it wastes less cycles waiting for data from an external chip.

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Just like the Vertex 2 100GB, the Inferno uses sixteen Intel branded, 29F64G08CAMDB chips which are also the exact same chips we found in the mid tier G. Skill Falcon 2. To be honest this is not all that surprising as SandForce does make a big deal out of the fact that you can use more mid grade NAND and still get best in class performance.

While Intel is not exactly free with some of their specifications as other manufacturers what we do know is these MLC NAND Flash chips are 34NM 64gigaBIT (8GB) units. Since there are 16 of them this means this drive is also in fact a 128GB drive, with 28GB set aside for over provisioning. In other words except for the different PCB, the Inferno is basically the exact same drive as the Vertex 2 at the component layer. This is disappointing as while the Vertex 2 has wide open / non hobbled firmware whereas this drive uses the more mundane mass production firmware which SandForce took the proverbial axe to and hacked its small file performance to pieces.

 

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A Look at DuraWrite, RAISE and More

A Look at DuraWrite, RAISE and More

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Let’s start with the white elephant in the room and explain why this 100GB drive is in reality a 128GB drive. The Inferno has sixteen 8GB NAND chips on board which gives it a capacity of 128GB, but is seen by the OS as 100GB. This is called “over-provisioning” and happens when a manufacturer has their drive consistently under report its size. Manufacturers use this to help increase IOPS performance and also extend life via wear leveling (as there is always free cells even when the drive is reported as “full”) and even durability since the drive has cells in reserve it can reassign sectors to as the “older” cells die. Having the Inferno giving up 28GB of its capacity to this “buffer” is extreme to say the least when you compare it to the Vertex 120GB with its more typical 6.28% (8GB) set aside. Some (like OCZ, Corsair, etc.) have also released “extended” drives which sport firmware that basically does away with this over provisioning which in effect increases the overall usable space.

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As we said, over-provisioning is usually for wear leveling and ITGC as it gives the controller extra cells to work with for not only keeping all the cells at about the same level of wear. However, this is actually not the main reason SandForce sets aside so much. Wear leveling is at best a secondary reason or even just a “bonus” as this over-provisioning is mainly for the Durawrite and RAISE technology. We will explain what those two technologies are but for the time being, let’s just say that while it there be “empty” space to some extent, it’s not really going to be 28GB of empty unused cells. Rather, this space is going to be used for other primary purposes.

Unlike other solid state drives which do not compress the data that is written to them, the SandForce controller does do real time loss-less compression. The upside to this is not only smaller lookup tables (and thus no need for off chip cache) but also means less writes will occur to the cells. Lowering how much data is written means that less cells have to be used to perform a given task and it should also result in longer life and even fewer controller cycles being taken up with internal house cleaning (via TRIM or ITGC).

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Longevity may be a nice side effect but the real purpose of this compression is so the controller has to use fewer cells to store a given amount of data and thus has to read from fewer cells than any other drive out there (SandForce claims only .5x is written on average). The benefit to this is even at the NAND level storage itself is the bottleneck for any controller and no matter how fast the NAND is, the controller is faster. Cycles are wasted in waiting for data retrieval and if you can reduce the number of cycles wasted, the faster an SSD will be.

Compressing data and thus hopefully getting a nice little speed boost is all well and fine but as anyone who has ever lost data to corruption in a compressed file knows, reliability is much more important. Compressing data means that any potential loss to a bad or dying cell (or cells) will be magnified on these drives so SandForce needed to ensure that the data was kept as secure as possible. While all drives use ECC, to further ensure data protection SandForce implemented another layer of security.

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Data protection is where RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) comes into the equation. All modern SSDs use various error correction concepts such as ECC because the simple fact of the matter is with any mass produced item there are going to be bad cells and even good cells are going to die off as time goes by; yet data cannot be lost or the end user’s experience will go from positive to negative. SandForce likes to compare RAISE to that of RAID 5, but unlike RAID 5 which uses a parity stripe, RAISE does not. SandForce does not explicitly say how it does what it does, but what they do say is on top of ECC, redundant data is striped across the array. However, since it is NOT parity data there is no added overheard incurred by calculating the parity stripe.

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According to Sandforce’s documentation, not only individual bits or even pages of data can be recovered but entire BLOCKS of data can be as well. So if a cell dies or passes on bad data the controller can compensate, pass on GOOD data and then mark the cell as defective. As we said, SandForce does not get into the nitty-gritty details of how DuraWrite or RAISE works, but the fact that it CAN do all this means that it most likely is writing a hash table along with the data. This would explain on how it can not only assure data integrity but also why they have set aside so much of the storage capacity for these features.

SandForce is so sure of their controller abilities that they state that the chances of data corruption are not only lower than that of other manufactures’ drives, but actually approaches ZERO chance of data corruption. This is a very bold statement, but only time will tell if their estimates are correct. In the mean time, we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that at the very least data corruption is as unlikely with an Inferno as it is on any modern MLC drive.

 

[AkG]

Firmware, Trim & Self Maintenance

Firmware, Trim & Self Maintenance

As you can see, the firmware which comes preloaded on the Inferno is labeled as "305A13F0” which is actually the “mass production” firmware that is commonly referred to as “305” or “3.0.5”. What this means is that this firmware has the all tweaks and bug fixes that go along with the later firmware revision but also has all the down sides to. As discussed in an earlier review, SandForce hobbled the small file IO/s performance of all drives but the Vertex 2.

This is not the first time we have seen this firmware revision as G.Skill and their Phoenix drive also use it, but G.Skill also use higher grade NAND to minimize the damage SandForce has done; something which Patriot sadly did not do.

What this all this means is that in theory this drive’s competition is more along the lines of the Agility 2 and not the Vertex 2, as the Agility 2 basically is the same drives as the Vertex 2 just without the fancy firmware.

On the positive side this firmware is TRIM enabled and is the latest version Patriot offers. Unfortunately, firmware 310 was recently released by OCZ for their SandForce drives. While OCZ calls it “1.1” that newer firmware revision is indeed the truly latest and greatest SandForce has to offer. In a future review we will go over exactly what 310 brings to the table compared to 305 but hopefully, Patriot is not too late to the party.

For anyone interested in whether or not the upcoming OCZ Toolbox (0.6 beta) works on the Inferno the answer is: yes it works.

The nicest feature we have found with this program is actually not the ability to see exactly how many bad cells there are, or how much of its expected lifespan is left but its secure erase option. Every single SandForce drive we have had the privilege of working with has come with SMART information erroneously reporting the drive as “Bad”. The drives are not bad, it’s just that since most SMART reading programs have been designed with hard drives in mind, they don’t exactly know what to make of this new breed of drives. A quick secure erase and the issue is gone to never reappear again (until the drive really IS dying). However, this usually means making a DOS bootable drive and doing a sanitary erase which, while not difficult, is time consuming and a bit of nuisance. This is actually nuisance which may turn some first time users off from Solid State Drives as you don’t have to do this with a regular Hard Disk Drive. Compare and contrast that hassle factor with pressing a button and having the problem go away and you can see why we are beginning to like this nifty little program.

 

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Testing Methodology

Testing Methodology

Testing a drive is not as simple as putting together a bunch of files, dragging them onto folder on the drive in Windows and using a stopwatch to time how long the transfer takes. Rather, there are factors such as read / write speed and data burst speed to take into account. There is also the SATA controller on your motherboard and how well it works with SSDs to think about as well. For best results you really need a dedicated hardware RAID controller w/ dedicated RAM for SSDs to shine. Unfortunately, most people do not have the time, inclination or monetary funds to do this. For this reason our testbed will be a more standard motherboard with no mods or high end gear added to it. This is to help replicate what you the end user’s experience will be like.

Even when the hardware issues are taken care of the software itself will have a negative or positive impact on the results. As with the hardware end of things, to obtain the absolute best results you do need to tweak your OS setup; however, just like with the hardware solution most people are not going to do this. For this reason our standard OS setup is used. However, except for the XP load test times we have done our best to eliminate this issue by having the drive tested as a secondary drive. With the main drive being a WD 320 single platter drive.

For these tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HDTune, Cystal Disk Benchmark, h2benchw, SIS Sandra Removable Storage benchmark, and IOMeter for synthetic benchmarks.

For real world benchmarks we timed how long XP startup took, Adobe CS3 (w/ enormous amounts of custom brushes installed) took, how long a single 4GB rar file took to copy to and then from the hard drives, then copy to itself. We also used 1gb of small files (from 1kb to 20MB) with a total 2108 files in 49 subfolders.

For the temperature testing, readings are taken directly from the hottest part of the drive case using a Digital Infrared Thermometer. The infrared thermometer used has a 9 to 1 ratio, meaning that at 9cm it takes it reading from a 1 square cm. To obtain the numbers used in this review the thermometer was held approximately 3cm away from the heatsink and only the hottest number obtained was used.


Please note to reduce variables the same XP OS image was used for all the hard drives.

For all testing a Gigabyte PA35-DS4 motherboard was used. The ICH9 controller on said motherboard was used.

All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented.

Processor: Q6600 @ 2.4 GHZ
Motherboard: Gigabyte p35 DS4
Memory: 4GB G.Skill PC2-6400
Graphics card: Asus 8800GT TOP
Hard Drive: 1x WD 320
Power Supply: Seasonic S12 600W

SSD FIRMWARE (unless otherwise noted):
G. Skill Titan: 0955
G.Skill Falcon: 1571 (AKA FW 1.3)
OCZ Apex: 955
OCZ Vertex: 1.3 (AKA FW 1571)
Patriot Torqx: 1571 (AKA FW 1.3)
Corsair P64: 18C1Q
OCZ Summit: 1801Q
A-Data S592: 1279 (AKA PRE 1.1 FW)
OCZ Agility EX 60GB: 1.3 (AKA 1.4 for MLC Indilinx Drives)
Kingston SSDNow V 40GB: 02G9
G.Skill Falcon 2: 1881 (AKA 1.4)
Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB: AGYA0201
Corsair Nova: 1.0 (AKA 1916/1.5 for most other MLC Indilinx Drives)
Corsair Force F100: 0.2 (AKA bug fixed / modified 3.0.1)
OCZ Vertex 2: 1.0 (custom “full speed” SandForce 305 firmware)
G.Skill Phoneix: 305 (standard “mass production” firmware)
Patriot Inferno: 305 (standard “mass production” firmware)

 

[AkG]

Read Bandwidth / Write Performance

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

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While it is interesting to note that this drive has a higher burst rate than the others, we really don’t put much value on “burst” performance. When it comes to the actual important number, average read speed, this drive is just as good as all the other SandForce drives.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

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While the average speed of the Inferno is, well…AVERAGE for a solid state drive but the minimum write speed did get us to sit up straight and take notice. Plainly put this drive has the best minimum write speed of any drive (including SLC based SSD’s) we have tested. This is quite the accomplishment for Patriot. Of course the difference between the various SandForce drives running 305 firmware is small and the slightly elevated difference could just be from NAND batch variation.

 

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Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read

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As expected the sequential and 512 read speed of this drive is impressive but par for the course with SandForce-based drives. Unfortunately, the less than stellar 4k read speed also was expected. SandForce drives just have to DO so much, even for something as simple as a read that their numbers do suffer. Of course, 26 MB/s is still impressive and it appears that any hobbling of the drive really doesn’t show up on reads…or at least it doesn’t when the que depth is ultra light.

Write

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Sadly, Crystal DiskMark really doesn’t show the full story of what is happening. Even if we were to include the 32 que depth and watch the difference expand to 10mb/s (90 to 80mb/s) that would still not tell the whole story. Crystal DiskMark runs 5 batches of a given test per size but only records the best number and unlike other SandForce drives we have seen the difference was startling. When you watch the numbers bounce around as much as they did with the Inferno does, one thing is for certain….something is going on beneath the surface.

 

[AkG]

Random Access Time / ATTO Disk Benchmark

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamout of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).

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Unfortunately, it seems like the latency of this drive lags behind other SandForce-equipped units. Even though the difference may not seem like much, we are sure that this added latency is going to be felt in the real world testing but only time will tell how big a handicap this really is.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

Read

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When it comes to the read curve the Inferno is fairly average for a SandForce controller based drive. It starts out a tad lower than the other 305 firmware wielding competition but the difference is not what we would consider significant or noteworthy and is well within the margin of error.

Write

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As with the read power curve, the write curve may be slightly lower than the other SandForce drives we have looked at in the past but the difference is not that big. All in all, the Inferno’s secrets are either extremely well hidden or it is a very average drive, one which poor latency or not is an all round decent choice.