The Pyro SE comes in a small, black and orange box. The front advertises many of the drive's key features including its MLC architecture, SATA 6Gbps interface and 2.5-inch form factor. There is also a small, plastic window which lets you look inside the box and see what the Pyro SE looks like. The back of the box provides a bit more information, including a longer list of features.

Patriot doesn't include a lot of extras with the Pyro SE. Aside from the SSD, the only other thing in the box is a small, fold out guide that contains a list of specifications as well as installation instructions for both desktop and notebook computers.

Physical Features:

The Pyro SE looks very similar to Patriot's WildFire and Pyro series SSDs. In fact, if it weren't for the large orange and black label on top, it would be very hard to tell them apart. The Pyro SE's outer casing is made out of cast aluminum and is held together using four hex screws. The drive also sports a durable, matte black finish as well as a silver border along the top edges of the case.

As I mentioned earlier, the Pyro SE uses SandForce's SF-2281 controller chip. The SF-2281 can be found in a number of other SSD's including the ADATA S511, Corsair Force Series 3, OWC Mercury 6G, Kingston HyperX and OCZ Vertex 3 as well as Patriot's own Wildfire and Pyro series.

For the 240GB Pyro SE, Patriot opted to use Micron's 16GB 25nm 29F128G08CFAAB synchronous NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are eight of these chips on either side of the PCB. If you do the math, you'll see that this equals 256GB and not the 240GB of storage the drive advertises. The SandForce controller uses this extra 7% (16GB) to maximize read and write performance and extend the endurance and overall reliability of the drive.