 Today I have a product that's making waves right now and it's kind of ironic because it's called a wildfire so how could it make waves? Waves are made of water. It makes no sense at all. But what I mean by making waves is that the internets are collectively very excited about this little product. So this is the wildfire SATA 3 SSD from Patriot. This is the 120 gig version although it is available in other capacities. Let's go ahead and look at the side of the package, look at the back of the package. So what do they have to say for themselves? It's a 2.5 inch form factor, low power consumption, SATA 3 compatible, okay good. Shock and vibration resistant, it better be. Silent operation, once again it better be. And free technical support, okay that's good to know. On the side we see nothing, on the bottom we see nothing really. Oh, package coming apart here, fix that. Actually it doesn't matter. Alright, so we've got a little window at the front. Let's open that up. Ooh, okay well here's where all the interesting stuff is. Oh that's kind of interesting, look at that. They give you a little map of all of the pinouts used for the power and the signals on the drive. This is like a schematic of the drive. That's kind of neat, I've never seen that included for the consumers unless you look pretty deep into the manufacturer website or like the SATA standards website. Okay installation instructions here for desktops and notebooks as well as some information about the drive. So let's have a look. Okay so it's available in 120, 240 and 480 gig capacities. It supports RAID 01 and 0 plus 1 if you use two drives although it would support any RAID level you desire if you use more. Data retention is up to 5 years at 25 degrees. Mean time between failure is 1,500,000 hours. It does support smart drive monitoring and its power consumption is less than 5 watts at max operational peak runningness. Okay environmental this or that, operation shock certification. You know it's funny that they don't include any performance metrics on the packaging because really that's what the wildfire is all about. This is a second generation sand force controller based drive so the 2281 controller and it uses toggle chips. Oh okay interesting. So I guess they could pack two drives in one package if they wanted to. That's how they design their packaging but they've given me one drive and a 3.5 to 2.5 inch adapter. It's funny they didn't even say they included an adapter on the outside here. Seems like kind of an oversight doesn't it? Because that's like a great selling point. Anyway okay so it uses toggle chips in addition to that advanced controller to achieve higher IOPS so that is 4K IOPS, IOs per second which means that in a desktop or even a server workload this drive will perform as fast as anything else out there in the market for a single SATA 3 6 gigabit per second drive because the performance of an SSD breaks down into a few different things. You got one, your controller. So the controller dictates what kind of a SATA interface you can hook up to it. It dictates how much processing it can do on the data for example with a sand force drive and this uses a sand force controller. It's actually going to be compressing the data before it writes it to the drive in order to save the NAND that is the flash from being overly worn out. So it actually if it writes one gig of data it might actually only physically write 750 megs of data theoretically some types of data are more or less compressible than others so that intelligence in the processor allows it to do that on the fly without you ever even being aware of it and it's very proven technology at this point. So you got your controller okay. The other thing you have is obviously your interface which is pretty much dictated by the controller. Next you have the flash so if you're using a low quality flash the controller can only read and write so fast to it. Also it's only going to last so long okay. The quality of the NAND affects how long it's going to last as well as the speed. So this is using the fastest NAND out there right now so that is why in terms of thorough put you're not going to see a drive like this rated for more megabytes per second sequential than other drives on the market but what you will see is that it is rated for better random performance so you know when you're you've got a video editing in the background you've got your antivirus running and you get like a MSN message for example which is a very very small piece of data. This is going to be able to do it more quickly than an SSD that doesn't perform little random things as well as this one does. So let's have a look at the included 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch drive adapter. So this is a pretty standard one I've seen these a number of times there's like one OEM who makes these and everyone including Corsair, OCZ and I guess Patriot uses them. So it comes with all the screws you need to mount the SSD to the adapter tray and then the adapter tray to your case. So let's have a quick close up look at the wildfire so it's got a great matte black finish on the top which is going to look really sharp in your case. Nice Patriot sticker that's a black, silver, see that's a shiny silver sticker those are more expensive you know you got to sort of notice these things okay you got some red on there. This is also nice too nice little touch you've got kind of a chromed shiny edge going all the way around the drive can you see the flash there like it's quite shiny. Okay on the side you got your standard mounting holes standard mounting holes on the other side you got your SATA power and that is a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second data interface back there. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Patriot wildfire don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.