Solid-State Drives are still all the rage, at least in the enthusiast community, though the opinions of those on the front line are filtering down to the masses, as more and more average Joes are asking me if they should jump on the SSD bandwagon. While we do still strongly believe the single most impressive upgrade anyone can do to boost the performance of their system is to add an SSD, we do not necessarily think you should.

Currently SSD technology still carries a serious price premium, and as an example today’s 100GB SSD review item costs a cool $370 US. That’s not much storage for the asking price, but it’s a reality all SSD owners will have faced. However for us the price is not the biggest concern we have for SSD technology right now.

Rather, we feel reliability is still the greatest challenge SSD technology faces, and this is something that is often overlooked. Generally speaking it is quite rare for a product to die during testing, and the vast majority of those that pass the testing phase go on to work for years to come and are often re-tested dozens of times.

However this is not the case with SSD products, and we have found the failure rate to be alarmingly high. Admittedly most of the dead products were based on the original JMicron controllers, though we have had two out of the four SSDs based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller fail, while a drive using the SandForce SF-1500 controller has also died, as well as a drive using the SF-1200 controller.

In fact, one of the only SSDs we have had for more than a year is the Intel X25-M, which is still going strong today. So while reliability is evidently an issue for this young technology, it is not all bad news, as drives are slowly improving and so is the warranty service that manufacturers are backing their SSD products with.

In fact, today’s review item is backed by a rather impressive warranty period that extends beyond the usual 2 years, and even the 3 years now being offered by OCZ and Corsair. Rather, Patriot is backing their new Inferno series with an incredible 5 year warranty, which is the same warranty period that Seagate offers on their hard drives.

This extended warranty period helps Patriot set their Inferno series, which is based on the popular SandForce SF-1200 controller, apart from the rest. This is important as most will need that peace of mind when spending $370 US on a 100GB drive or $680 US on a 200GB drive. Before we move on to see how the Patriot Inferno 100GB performs, let's first check it out in more detail...

The difference in available memory comes not only from the ~7% spare area you get from the GB to GiB conversion for moving data around, but also because SandForce specifies an additional 20% flash be set aside for its DuraWrite technology, which is designed to reduce write amplification and extend endurance.

Once formatted, the drive only has 93.1GB of usable space. SandForce claims the loss is unavoidable and that this method will eventually have to be adopted by all future solid state drives. The lost capacity increases as the drives become larger. The 200GB model for instance, which has 256GB of flash memory on the PCB, only has 185.5GB of usable storage space.

However OCZ has recently issued a new firmware that reduces the over-provisioning, which effectively turns the 100GB model into a 120GB model. This means the available capacities from OCZ are now 60/120/240/480. As it stands Patriot is yet to issue a similar update for the Inferno SSD series, leaving their models at 100/200GB capacities.

Something else we have found interesting about the SandForce controllers is that there is no DRAM cache. SandForce is able to do away with the cache by writing less to the flash, meaning there is less data to account for and smaller tables to manage on the fly. Because less data is being written, SandForce claims that manufacturers can use cheaper memory to save on costs.

The SandForce SF-1200 controller carries a small cache onboard, which is thought to be a few megabytes in size, though the exact figure hasn't been disclosed. Inside the controller there is also a Tensilica DC_570T CPU core. When we questioned the use of this CPU core, SandForce said it has little to do with the performance of the controller and stated that it is everything else around the CPU that matters.

The Vertex 2 features Intel 29F64G08CAMDB flash memory. In total there are 16 chips with 8GB capacity each. Patriot claims maximum read and write performance of 285 and 275 MB/s, respectively, which translates to 14% faster reads than most SSDs based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller, while the write speed is an astonishing 53% faster.

The drive uses a slim 2.5" design measuring 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm and weighing under 100 grams. Patriot is shipping these new Inferno drives with a 3.5" bay adapter for easier installation in a desktop computer.

The drive is said to use 2 watts of power when in use and 0.5 watts in standby. You can set these up to work in RAID if you were to purchase more than one. Finally, Patriot backs the Inferno with a massive 5-year warranty.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.6

For testing purposes we first ran each SSD through HD Tach's full disk benchmark, which fills the drive with a single contiguous file and thus forces a block rewrite for every successive write request. This was done to simulate the degradation problem that SSDs without support for the TRIM function are likely to face.

The Patriot Inferno 100GB performed in much the same way after we ran the full disk benchmark, as it does support the TRIM function and it appears to work well.

When running our custom 6GB single ISO file test we found that the Patriot Inferno 100GB was able to match the performance of the Intel X25-M 160GB with a throughput of 78MB/s. This did make the Inferno 100GB slightly slower than the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB, which was 5MB/s faster.

The program copy test is made up of many small non-compressed files, rather than a single large file like in our previous benchmark. This test appears to favor the Intel X25-M 160GB drive, which was slightly faster than the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB. Interestingly the Patriot Inferno 100GB was again slightly slower than the Vertex 2 100GB, trailing it by 3MB/s.

The game copy test comprises of a mixture of small and large files. The Patriot Inferno 100GB does not fare very well in this test as it lags behind the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB by 8MB/s, making it considerably slower than the Intel X25-M 160GB.

Despite proving to be slower than the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB in our real-world tests, the Patriot Inferno 100GB shows very strong performance in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark software as it just managed to win when measuring sequential performance.

Again when testing with CrystalDiskMark we see a minimal performance difference between the Patriot Inferno 100GB and OCZ Vertex 2 100GB drives, with the Inferno 100GB just edging out the Vertex 2 100GB.

Finally the Patriot Inferno 100GB finishes up strong in the random 4K-QD32 test, beating the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB when measuring both read and write performance.

Like CrystalDiskMark the AS SSD Benchmark also finds very little difference in performance between the Patriot Inferno 100GB and OCZ Vertex 2 100GB drives. In fact the Inferno 100GB is again awarded the edge over the Vertex 2 100GB, despite our real-world tests suggesting otherwise.

The AS SSD Benchmark 4K-64 thread results are interesting as the Patriot Inferno 100GB beats the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB when measuring read performance, while the Vertex 2 100GB was notably faster when measuring write performance. In any case the Intel X25-M 160GB was far superior in both tests.

The AS SSD Benchmark access time results favored the Patriot Inferno 100GB over the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB, particularly when looking at the read results.

The Atto Disk Benchmark is generally what SSD manufacturers use to claim the read and write performance of their products. As you can see the 128K read results are right on with the suggested read performance of 285MB/s. The Patriot Inferno 100GB was again found to be slightly faster than the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB in this test, though for the most part the results did overlap.

The write performance is very similar to the read performance when testing with the Atto Disk Benchmark, and again we find that the Patriot Inferno 100GB reaches the claimed 275MB/s write performance when using the 128K sample data.

Using HD Tach we measure random read and write performance with a range of data sample sizes. First up was the 512 bytes test, and things looked good for the Patriot Inferno 100GB. The Inferno 100GB consistently outperformed the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB in this test, delivering strong performance.

The Patriot Inferno 100GB remained strong when measuring the 1MB random performance, as it again just managed to outperform the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB.

Finally the random file size test measuring random read/write performance shows little difference between the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB and Patriot Inferno 100GB drives. While the Inferno 100GB provided better read performance, the Vertex 2 100GB hit the lead when measuring write performance.

The current asking price appears to be around $370 US, while G.Skill are asking $360 US for their 120GB Phoenix Pro which also uses the SandForce SF-1200 controller. Then we have the Corsair Force 120GB for $350 US and the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB can be had for just $320 US, both feature the SandForce SF-1200 controller with the latest firmware.

When compared to the popular Intel X25-M, the Patriot Inferno is certainly more costly, with a higher price per gigabyte, but you also get a similar increase in performance. The biggest momentum killer for the Patriot Inferno, which also plagued other early SandForce-based SSD drives, is the memory that must be set aside for the DuraWrite technology. This is by far the largest factor affecting the cost per gigabyte rate of these drives, though a new firmware has corrected the issue.

As a result, the Intel X25-M currently costs around $2.81/GB, while the new Patriot Inferno will cost a staggering $3.70 per gigabyte if the list price of $370 holds still. However the price per gigabyte could improve shortly if Patriot issues the same firmware as Corsair, OCZ and G.Skill to reduce the over-provisioning, turning this 100GB drive into a 120GB drive. This would significantly improve the drives value, reducing the cost per gigabyte to around $3.00, placing it on more even ground with the Intel X25-M.

Another big question mark over the Patriot Inferno and other SandForce SSDs is reliability. In fact, we are still a little dubious regarding SSD reliability in general, and with good reason as discussed earlier in the review. Although we have already seen two pre-production SandForce SSDs fail on our test bed, we are yet to break a production model. That said, our original production Vertex 2 (SandForce SF-1200) drive is not even 3 months old yet, so it still has a long way to go before proving itself.

Therefore, we are also keen to see how the Patriot Inferno 100GB holds up over the coming months and years to come. Those cautious about where they invest their hard earned cash would be wise to wait and see how these new Inferno SSDs fare, and of course this goes for any solid-state drive based on the new SandForce controllers.

However, making the Inferno purchase significantly less risky is the impressive 5 year warranty, which we believe is unmatched by the competition. This lengthy warranty should attract heavy power users, as it means they do not have to be as conservative with the Inferno. After all, at some point in time all SSDs will fail to write data, and it is nice to know that an investment in the Inferno will not be written off within a 5 year period.

Bottom-line, the new Patriot Inferno has proven to deliver top notch performance with an unbeatable warranty, but we are hoping improvements can be made on the pricing side soon, while we'd also be careful about the reliability of the drives, at least until things settle down with SandForce drives shipping in more massive quantities.