Patriot Wildfire 120GB Review! But with a Marvell Controller!

Hey all!

So we've all seen the latest reviews on the new SSD's coming out, in my case the Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD. With its SATA 3 interface and 32nm Toshiba Toggle NAND, it's pretty speedy at 500+ MB/s sequential read and write. But all these reviews use good Intel SATA 3 controllers! What about those of us with a P55 board that are stuck with the infamous Marvell SATA 3 controllers? Well, I'm here to compare the two, and see what kind of performance we'll get by using a high performance current-gen SSD with a SATA controller that would make any enthusiast cry.

PC Specs:
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E Pro
CPU: Intel i5-760 OC'ed to 4.0 Ghz
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaw 2X2Gb at DDR3-1600
GPU: MSI Geforce 470 GTX Twin Frozr II edition OC'ed to 700/1674 Mhz
HDD: Patriot Wildfire 120Gb SSD, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB

And results!

ATTO Disk Benchmark, first the Marvell SATA 3 controller and then the Intel SATA 2 controller:


Here we can see that the Marvell SATA 3 controller shows nowhere near the performance that the Wildfire is capable of, with reads maxing at 393 MB/s and writes maxing at 184 MB/s. Not only does the read performance take a 20% hit, write performance is down a huge 65%. The Intel SATA 2 controller shows reads at 284 MB/s and writes are 268 MB/s. Obviously the drive is recovering its performance, but is now hitting the limits of SATA 2 transfer speeds.

Now for CrystalDiskMark, using random data:


And with 0fill data favoured by manufacturers since it produces higher numbers:


Again, we see the Marvell SATA 3 controller performing poorly, with reduced read and vicious cuts to write speed. The Intel SATA 2 controller picks up the write speed again, but is bottlenecked by the SATA 2 interface.

*****

For comparison to the Wildfire's performance with a good controller, see: http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/patriot-wildfire-12...

*****

So there we have it, the Patriot Wildfire 120Gb brought down to its knees. As a boot drive, I'm leaning towards using the Intel SATA 2 interface, which will allow Windows to accomplish its many random writes that much faster, at the expense of the less-used sequential transfers.

What do you guys think? Marvell SATA 3 or Intel SATA 2? Or just return this and buy a cheap last-generation SSD?

Suggestions for other tests are welcome!