Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB looks nothing like your traditional Serial ATA solid state drive, and this is because it is not your traditional solid state drive. The Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB is actually an M.2 2280 format SSD, just like the OCZ RD400A 512GB, except the OCZ RD400A 512GB comes with a half-height, half length (HHHL) PCI Express adapter board. The Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB works on the NVMe 1.2 logical device interface, and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means it the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. A label on the Hellfire SSD itself carries miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, and product type. Like many flash storage solutions we have reviewed in the past, this Patriot drive is made in Taiwan. Removing the label in question will void your three-year warranty, but there is no real reason why you need to do that, haha.
Upon closer inspection of the blue printed circuit board, it reveals a fairly simple layout. Electrically, the M.2 NVMe physically interfaces with PCIe 3.1. It uses four lanes for up to 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is a paltry 9g for the Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB.
Flipping the Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB around, and you will find few components of interest. At the heart of Patriot's Hellfire M.2 240GB is a quad core Phison PS5007-E7 controller. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to overcome traditional Serial ATA bandwidth bottlenecks, with support for 8-channel flash access. Other features include SmartECC, SmartFlush, GuaranteedFlush, built in static and dynamic wear leveling, L1.2 power saving mode, and end to end data path protection. On the SSD itself, Patriot posts no power consumption rating. I think it is safe to assume it uses quite a bit of power, as this is a high performance product.
Rated at 3000MB/s read, 2300MB/s write, and up to 185,000 IOPS over NVMe 1.2 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are really impressive. It is roughly six times to speed of a regular SATA 6Gb/s drive, and by far the highest rated drive we have ever tested here at APH Networks. For comparison, the OCZ RD400A 512GB is rated at 2600MB/s read, 1600MB/s write, and up to 190,000 IOPS. Meanwhile, the OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB is rated at 1800MB/s read, 1700MB/s write, and up to 140,000 IOPS. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit them against the big boys of this game to see how this new flagship from Patriot steps up against all the popular SSDs from manufacturers like Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, Toshiba OCZ, and even Patriot themselves in the next eight pages or so.
A total of four NAND flash chips are found on the Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB solid state disk, with two of them on each side. I cannot find any more information on what the NAND flash memory labeled "DA79G5LAUA" is, but I do know they are multi-level cells with a capacity of 64GB per integrated circuit chip. The SSD has a decent rated write endurance of 115TB, which equates to roughly 63GB per day for five years. 16GB out of the 256GB total capacity (Just under 7%) is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 240GB, as advertised. You will see 223GB in Windows. One Nanya branded NT5CC128M16IP-DI 256MB DDR3L-1600 chip is present; it is used by the Phison PS5007-E7 controller for system memory.
Just for convenience, I decided to install the Hellfire on a PCI Express adapter board for testing.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.6GHz
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK
RAM: Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile PC3-17000 4x8GB
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: Fractal Design Define R5
Storage: OCZ Vector 180 240GB; Crucial MX200 500GB
Power: PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 1200W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi Bravura
Optical Drive: LiteOn iHAS224-06 24X DVD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB
- Crucial BX100 500GB
- Crucial MX100 256GB
- Crucial MX200 500GB
- Crucial MX300 750GB
- G.Skill Phoenix EVO 115GB
- Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB
- Kingston HyperX 120GB
- Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
- Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB
- Kingston SSDNow UV400 480GB
- Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB
- 2x Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB RAID 0
- OCZ ARC 100 240GB
- OCZ Agility 3 240GB
- OCZ Agility 4 256GB
- OCZ Octane 512GB
- OCZ RD400A 512GB
- OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
- OCZ Trion 100 480GB
- OCZ Trion 150 480GB
- OCZ Vector 150 240GB
- OCZ Vector 180 240GB
- OCZ Vector 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 2 160GB 25nm
- OCZ Vertex 2 60GB 34nm
- OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB
- OCZ Vertex 3.20 240GB
- OCZ Vertex 4 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 460 240GB
- Patriot Blaze 240GB
- Patriot Ignite 480GB
- Patriot Pyro 120GB
- Patriot Pyro SE 240GB
- SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
- SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB
- SanDisk Ultra II 240GB
- Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB
- Toshiba OCZ TL100 240GB
- Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB
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 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
