Computex 2010 Coverage

Patriot Memory

Patriot Memory continues the trend of well-known memory manufacturers pushing non-memory components. But I'm not one to complain about that - not when the first thing I was shown by Director of Marketing Eric Ackerson was the Artemis II. Put simply, Patriot's Artemis II is a beast. Featuring a Super Micro X8DTH-i dual-Xeon motherboard, twelve sticks of Patriot 4GB DDR3-1333MHz ECC-Registered RAM, and seven LSI 9260-8i SATA RAID controllers, Patriot connected 14 Patriot Convoy 425S drive bays, each containing four Patriot INFERNO 200GB SSDs. That equates to 56 INFERNO 200GB SSDs in RAID-0, achieving over 160,000 Total I/Os per Second according to the Iometer benchmark on display!

Obviously, the Patriot Artemis II wasn't built for resale, but rather to showcase its products, the Convoy 425S and INFERNO SSD. The Convoy 425S and its aluminum-casing brother, the Convoy 425XL, are pretty sweet, holding up to four 2.5" HDDs or SSDs in a single 5.25" drive bay. They also support RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, Clone, Large, and JBOD configurations, and each drive tray is individually hot swappable. They support speeds up to 3 Gb/s and have LED status/activity lights for each drive.

The Patriot INFERNO Series of solid state drives feature the SandForce SF-1200 and MLC NAND Flash, delivering speeds of 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write. They come in 100GB and 200GB capacities and include a 3.5" bracket for mounting in desktops.

Next up was the Patriot Box Office. This tiny media player features an internal 2.5" SATA drive slot for use with any SSD/HDD, but also features three USB2.0 ports to connect to external drives, and also a 10/100 Ethernet connection and optional WiFi USB adapter. The Box Office supports full HD video playback up to 1080p and supports many of today's popular file formats for video, images and audio. The Box Office ships with HDMI, Composite and USB cables, as well as remote.

Ackerson also showed me a few SuperSpeed USB 3.0 peripherals. First up was the Gauntlet, an all aluminum 2.5" HDD or SSD enclosure that offers transfer rates up to 5Gb/s. Next were the SuperSpeed USB PCI-e Adapter Card and SuperSpeed USB 2-Port ExpressCard. Both cards allow you to add two USB3.0 ports to your existing devices, providing transfer rates up to 5Gb/s.

Speaking of USB3.0, Patriot is updating its Xporter Magnum line of USB Flash drives with the Xporter Magnum Plus. But seeing how expensive the USB2.0 Magnum drives are, I'm scared to see how much the USB3.0 Magnum Plus drives will sell for.

Another update is to Patriot's LX Series of SDHC memory cards, adding a 64GB version.

I couldn't visit the Patriot booth without a look at some system memory. Patriot was showing off its Viper Sector 5 modules featuring speeds up to DDR3-2500.