By: Aaron Lai
May 8, 2020
When asked what my favorite item to bake is, I often struggle between three things: Cookies, cakes, and bread. All of these offer a good amount of variety in terms of flavors and ingredients. For one, I bake more cookies than anything else within a calendar year, mainly because of how quick it is to make and bake them. Secondly, I enjoy cakes because I like to see how much it rises compared to the batter going into the oven. In some ways, I think I need to be a bit more delicate with cakes just because they can be more fragile. As for bread, this is genuinely my favorite thing to bake. There is something about the simplicity in its ingredients and yet the transformation that takes place from mixing, rising, and kneading that makes the whole process an enjoyable one. I probably am still very inexperienced in baking altogether, but baking bread is something that I want to explore more of. On the other hand, Patriot is not an amateur when it comes to making solid state drives. We have been reviewing Patriot drives since 2011, when we took a look at their Pyro 120GB. Since then, they have pushed out both high-end and budget options to satisfy both the speed demon and the wallet watcher in terms of providing solid SSDs. However, when it comes to NVM Express, or NVMe for short, drives, we have really only looked at their higher end options like the Hellfire M.2 or the Viper VPN100. So, what happens when we have the faster NVMe standard at a budget pricing? The result is the Patriot P300 512GB, which is exactly what we have today. How does this drive stack up when compared to other Patriot drives and its competitors? Let us read on to find out!
Today's review unit of the Patriot P300 512GB arrived from Patriot's offices in Fremont, California. Traveling in a brown corrugated cardboard box, this box was also padded with plush plastic pockets to prevent any problems with the packaging of the Patriot P300. The retail container of this solid state drive is pretty minimal, as we will see soon enough. In addition, the box this product traveled in was unharmed during transportation, which is good to see. I grabbed a knife and opened up the box to get a closer look.
The retail packaging of the Patriot P300 512GB is just a cardboard card, similar to what you might find with Secure Digital cards. The front is in the standard Patriot blue with the company's name and product name on the top left corner. Underneath, we have a description of "M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 Solid State Drive". At the top, we have the capacity of this drive, which is 512GB. Just for your information, the Patriot P300 comes in capacities that range from 128GB to 2TB. The drive itself is exposed in the plastic shell at the front. Around the back, we have a few features listed in several languages, including the three-year warranty included with all capacities of the P300.
Before we continue on, I have grabbed the product's features from the manufacturer's website for your perusal:
Built with the latest PCIe 3 x 4 controller
2280 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x 4, NVMe 1.3
End to end data path protection.
SmartECC technology
Thermal throttling technology
Operating Temperature: 0 ~ 70°C
Power Consumption: Full: 2.07W Idle: 0.37W
TBW: 160TB
4K Aligned Random Read: up to 290K IOPs
4K Aligned Random Write: up to 260K IOPs
Sequential Read (ATTO): up to 1,700MB/s
Sequential Write (ATTO): up to 1,100MB/s
Sequential Read (CDM): up to 1,700MB/s
Sequential Write (CDM): up to 1,100MB/s
O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10
Out of the box, Patriot has the P300 sitting in a clear plastic clamshell case. Otherwise, there is no form of documentation or warranty information, so any of this will require you to look at Patriot's website. There is nothing else included with this solid state drive, whether in the form of additional backup software on the drive or in terms of additional accessories, though this is not too surprising either.
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 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
