On the heels of its performance-orientated Wildfire series, Patriot has developed a more cost effective solution for mainstream system builders. Based on SandForce's SF-2281 controller, the Pyro series appears to take aim at the Agility 3. OCZ's budget offering uses the same SandForce controller and similar NAND flash memory.

Despite costing more, the Pyro claims to offer slightly more speed, citing blazingly fast 550MB/s sequential reads and up to 515MB/s sequential writes using SATA 6.0Gb/s. At first glance, it seems the Pyro might be fairly priced against the Agility 3, but we have a sneaking suspicion this isn't the case and Patriot will have to lower its prices.

We're also curious to test the Pyro's RAID0 performance. At $410, pair of Pyro 120GB drives cost considerably less than a single Patriot Wildfire 240GB drive ($515), which could reveal some compelling results. We could speculate on drive performance all day, but let's press onward and see where Patriot's budget contender stands in the market.