Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
When it comes to looks, the Patriot P400 NVMe SSD 1 TB is a very simple looking SSD, both in appearance and physical layout. Looking at the photo above, we can see that a small black heatsink in the form of a graphene-coated aluminum label is included, making it so the components are not exposed. This is similar to the Kingston KC3000 1TB. The heatsink covers the electronic components. The heatsink contains the company branding, model name, and PCIe generation.
The Patriot P400 NVMe SSD 1 TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. When it comes to the M.2 physical standard, the M.2 2280 designation means it the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The NVMe 1.4 logical device interface is what the Patriot P400 1TB works on. As with any NVMe interface, the P400 plugs into compatible motherboards directly for faster read and write speeds. The M.2 NVMe interface works with PCIe 4.0. The weight of this SSD is 9g.
Turning the Patriot P400 NVMe SSD 1 TB over reveals a regulatory certification sticker placed on the PCB. Along with the branding and model name, the sticker contains the part number, capacity size, serial number, and certifications. Other than that, there are no components of note on the backside of the P400. This drive is manufactured in Taiwan.
Upon closer inspection, we can see some key components on the Patriot P400 1TB. We see an INNOGRIT controller with the label "IG5220BAA". As a cost-saving method, there is no DRAM for this controller. Generally, DRAM on SSDs is utilized to write data to the drive as a cache. A table is stored that maps the physical logical block addresses located on the NAND flash memory. DRAM IC chips are not cheap though, so it is no uncommon for budget drives to keep these out. This does come at a cost of performance though, as DRAM-less SSDs will store this mapping data directly on the NAND flash or your computer's RAM via something called the Host Memory Buffer, which is quite a bit slower than onboard DRAM. In the case of the Patriot P400 1TB, it uses an HMB to compensate for the lack of DRAM.
The Patriot P400 NAND flash memory contains the label "PMFC-B8F46A1CD00". These are Micron-manufactured 176L triple level cell chips. There are a total of two NAND flash memory chips on this drive, despite there being four spots. The rated write endurance is an impressive 800TB, which equates to about 438GB per day for five years. Nothing out of the 1024GB capacity is used for controller overhead. In Windows, you will have 953GB of storage, which is higher than the normal 931GB of storage that you would expect to see on your average 1TB drive.
At 5000MB/s read, 4800MB/s write, and up to 620,000 IOPs read and 550,000 IOPs write, these are modest numbers over the PCIe 4.0 interface, but this is a budget drive. To see how these specifications play out in our tests, we will pit the Patriot P400 1TB against other PCIe 4.0-based NVMe drives from major manufacturers. Just to note, the WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB is not a PCIe 4.0-based drive, but it uses the PCIe 3.0 x8 interface with two PCIe 3.0-based drives in RAID 0, so we will include it in for comparison.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
CPU Cooling: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL240 Flux
Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk
RAM: Thermaltake TOUGHRAM XG RGB DDR4-4000 2x8GB
Graphics: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 TI
Chassis: Corsair 5000D
Power: SilverStone Decathlon DA850 Gold 850W
Storage: Samsung EVO 970 1TB, Lexar NQ100 480GB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
