CES 2011 Coverage

Patriot Memory

Patriot has always been a big presence at CES and this year is no different. The company had a lot to show off and with the amount of time that went into these products, I am not surprised it showed them off proudly. This year, Patriot had some new additions to its product line, as well as some tried and true favorites that deserved a second go around in the public’s eye.

The first part of its display was its storage systems and media players. This year, Patriot displayed several favorites, including the updated PBO (Patriot Box Office) Core media player, the Gearbox mini NAS, and the Valkyrie NAS system. New to our eyes were the two new NAS systems, the S2 and S4. Both have support for RAID, ITunes Server and Windows Media Player. The S2 contains two drive bays, while the S4 contains four. In addition to the NAS units, Patriot had some USB 3.0 enclosures — perfect for its new drives.

Next up for our viewing pleasure were a few of its high end memory lines — the Viper Extreme rated for 2000MHz with timings of 9-11-9-27, a G2 set rated at 1600MHz with timings of 9-9-9-24, and a set of Sector 5 RAM at a high 2250MHz with timings of 9-9-9-27.

What would a CES show be without the SSD and Flash memory? Again, Patriot had on display some tried and true models, as well as some new and exciting ones. For the SSDs, Patriot had its Inferno and Torqx TRD, which are the high and value line, respectively, as well as its new Wildfire solid state drive that uses an unknown controller. However, with Marvell and Sandforce making SATA 6Gbps controllers, it will be interesting to see which one is included in it. In addition to the SSDs, there were several mainstream and high performance thumb drives and flash cards. One drive of note is the Supersonic USB 3.0 flash drive with read speeds of up to 100MB/s and write speeds of up to 70MB/s.

To give us a sweet taste of the power that Patriot offers, it had two systems set up running demos. The first system had 8GB of memory and one 240GB Inferno SSD and showed an impressive ATTO score of about 240MB/s read and 235MB/s write. The other system was running 16GB of memory with four 240GB Inferno drives in RAID-0 and again showed an impressive 880MB/s read and about 745MB/s write scores.