Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB looks nothing like your traditional Serial ATA solid state drive, because it is not your traditional solid state drive. Like all performance SSDs, the Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB is in the M.2 2280 format. 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. Its components are located on the blue printed circuit board, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. A black, one centimeter tall Viper aluminum heatsink with six thermal fins comes attached from the factory by double-sided tape to keep the SSD cool. To ensure you know things are going well inside your PC, it even comes with an external thermal sensor. The Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB works on the NVMe 1.3 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 3.0. The VPN100 uses four lanes for up to 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is 25g; most of which is the heatsink.
Taking the heatsink off, and you can see what the Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB is made from. There are four components that can be seen. At the heart of Patriot's Viper VPN100 512GB is a Phison E12 controller. The Phison E12 controller is built on the TSMC 28nm lithography process and supports LDPC and StrongECC error correcting schemes. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to overcome traditional Serial ATA bandwidth bottlenecks. A Nanya 512MB memory chip is present; it is used by the controller for system memory. The VPN100's flash memory are two Toshiba 256GB 64-layer BICS 3D triple-level cell chips labeled TCBBG55A1V. Its rated write endurance is a whopping 800TB, which equates to about 438GB per day for five years. This is by far the best I have seen here at APH Networks. Its power consumption is not specified. The actual usable space is 512GB, as advertised. You will see 476GB in Windows.
Flipping the Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB around and you will find no components of interest. The label on the VPN100 itself carries miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. Other than that, it is completely blank as all the components are located on the other side. This SSD is made in Taiwan, just like the Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB.
Specified at 3300MB/s read, 2200MB/s write, and up to 700,000 IOPS over NVMe 1.3 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are impressive. It is six times the speed of a regular SATA 6Gb/s drive and among the fastest group of SSDs benchmarked here at APH Networks. For comparison, the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB is rated at 3500MB/s read, 2300MB/s write, and up to 390,000 IOPS. Meanwhile, the Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB is rated at 3470MB/s read, 3000MB/s write, and up to 560,000 IOPS. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the VPN100 against the big boys of this game to see how this new flagship from Patriot steps up against some popular PCI Express based SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA, Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Toshiba OCZ, Western Digital, and even Patriot themselves in the next nine pages or so.
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 R6 Blackout TG
Storage: OCZ Vector 180 240GB; Crucial MX200 500GB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD
Optical Drive: LiteOn iHAS224-06 24X DVD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P1 500GB
- Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB
- Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
- OCZ RD400A 512GB
- OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
- Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB
- Toshiba RC100 240GB
- Western Digital Black NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB
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 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
