Specifications, Pricing and Availability

Before we get started, let's touch base with the Patriot Wildfire. You can read the full review of a single drive in this article that was just published a couple days ago. The Wildfire is spec-tacular; SATA III (6Gb/s), 555MB/s read with a single drive and 512MB/s write speed. Wildfire also has a claimed 85,000 IOPS write speed to boot, so a large amount of small file transfers happen almost as fast as your large file transfers.

Of course, there are other SandForce SF-2281 controlled drives paired with Toshiba Toggle flash on the market, but the Patriot Wildfire currently costs less than the Vertex 3 Max IOPS. Both drives come with a three year warranty, desktop adapter bracket and all of the goodies you need to get your drive installed quickly.

Here we see the Patriot Wildfire retail package.

The inner packaging is everything you want in a package. The drive is kept separate from the desktop adapter bracket so the two can't scratch each other.

Oh yeah, we have two of them! The drive on the left is a full retail drive that came with our retail packaging and the drive on the right is a late engineering sample. Both shipped to us with the same firmware and performed equally. Both drives also arrived the same day which was a bit odd; we expected the ES drive to arrive a little sooner, but oh well, we have them both now.