Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
Just like many NVMe options, the Patriot P300 512GB looks very similar to other gum stick-sized solid state drives. It has a large white sticker that sits on top of all of the components. This sticker shows off the model name, capacity, and model number. As you can see, there is a "US" appended to the end of the model number. Patriot has made two variants of their P300 for each of the capacities, one for North America and the other for the rest of the world, and the differences will be explained later on. From a visual standpoint, M.2 drives are quite unlike any traditional 2.5" drive. Specifically, the Patriot P300 is an M.2 2280 SSD. This physical standard of 2280 refers to its physical size of 22mm by 80mm. The components are located on the dark teal printed circuit board to the side of the branding sticker, which we will take a detailed look at shortly. Just to note, the international variant utilizes a black printed circuit board. The Patriot P300 512GB works on the NVMe 1.3 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, the M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 3.0. The P300 utilizes up to four lanes for a theoretical maximum of 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The mass is approximately 6g for the P300. Otherwise, the label also shows that this is made in Taiwan.
Underneath the white label of the Patriot P300 512GB, we are exposed to several components. There are two main components to take note of. The first is the Phison PS5013-E13T controller. This is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to overcome traditional SATA bottlenecks. On the international version, you will find the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller instead. Both of these controllers are meant to operate with no DRAM external to the controller. This is a bit of a disadvantage to have no DRAM on an SSD, as this can affect performance, but this is common cost-cutting measure seen on budget drives. On the other hand, this DRAMless solid-state drive utilizes HMB, or host memory buffer, which uses the system's memory as a buffer location for faster access compared to flash NAND access. This is only available with Windows 10. We will see the effects of this during our tests.
Underneath, we have four black chips, marked with "TA7AG55AWV". The Patriot P300 512GB uses Toshiba 3D triple-level cell flash NAND memory. The four chips mean each one has 128GB of capacity. The total rated write endurance for the 512GB variant is 160TB, which equates to a bit over 146GB per day for three years. This is rather on the low side, even for a budget drive, as other options offer far superior write endurance. Furthermore, this drive is only covered for three years, compared to the lengthier five-year warranty that is more standard. The Patriot P300 512GB's has a power consumption of 2.07W at peak performance and 370mW at idle. In the Windows operating system, you will see 476.9GB available for use after formatting. On the back side, you will see there are no components or labels of interest.
Specified at 1700MB/s read, 1100MB/s write, and up to 290K IOPS over NVMe 1.3 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are fit the wallet-friendly nature of the P300. This is still quite a bit faster than SATA 6Gb/s solid state drives. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit this middle of the ground SSD against other PCI Express based SSDs from popular manufacturers like ADATA, Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next nine pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K
CPU Cooling: CRYORIG C7
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5
RAM: Patriot Viper 4 Blackout DDR4-3600 2x8GB
Graphics: Integrated
Chassis: Fractal Design Era
Storage: Gigabyte UD PRO 256GB
Power: FSP Dagger Pro 650W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Patriot P300 512GB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P1 500GB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB
- Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
- OCZ RD400A 512GB
- OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
- Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Toshiba RC100 240GB
- Western Digital Black NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 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 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
