How fast is an SSD for your desktop or laptop?

Patriot P300 is a bright representative of the low-cost solid—state drives of the new wave. Made in the newfangled M format .2 NVMe, and with full-fledged four PCI-E 3.0 lines, and not narrowed x2, like last year's models. But it costs only a little more than the simplest 2.5" SATA SSD. But the "filling", as is often the case with low-cost SSDs, may differ. The Patriot P300 modification presented right now in east european retail, which is easily recognized by a black printed circuit board (volumes from 256 GB to 1 TB), is based on a bundle of Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller and 64-layer 3D TLC flash memory produced by IMFT (a joint venture between Intel and Micron).

The SM2263XT controller has two ARM Cortex-R5 cores and works with flash memory in four-channel mode. But the SSD does not have its own operational buffer, but it does it more cunningly — it uses part of the RAM of a PC or laptop as a cache (Host Memory Buffer technology).On the one hand, an SSD consumes half a gigabyte of RAM, and, on the other, modern PCs have fast 64+64-bit DDR4 memory, whereas soldered or integrated into other low-cost SSDs is slow 16—bit DDR3. Thanks to HBM technology, the Patriot P300 demonstrates an enviable, as for its class, IOPS indicator — up to 290K.

Linear read and write speeds are average: 2100 and 1650 Mbps, respectively. Moreover, in the case of writing very large files, the speed is reduced to 300 Mbps. Anyway, this exceeds the performance of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, but still inferior to the flagship PCI-E 3.0 SSDs, such as Patriot Memory Viper VPN100 VPN100-1TBM28H 1 TB with speeds of 3450/3000 Mbps.

The second modification of the Patriot P300 (blue printed circuit board, from 128 GB to 2 TB), which has already been seen in foreign online stores, and will probably soon be on the market with us, is based on a bundle of the Phison E13T controller and 3D QLC flash memory manufactured by Kioxia (the new name of Toshiba's semiconductor division). This also dual-core four-channel controller is a direct competitor to the aforementioned SM2263XT, but has a small integrated RAM cache.

But the Toshiba/Kioxia 3D QLC flash memory in the "blue" version of the Patriot P300, although theoretically it has a third less guaranteed rewrite resource (320 TB for a terabyte model), but in fact, thanks to a denser layout (96 layers of memory cells), it works just as fast as TLC. As a result, it turns out that there is not much difference which of the modifications of the Patriot P300 (black or blue) to take — both are equally fast.

Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB is one of the fastest, and even richly equipped solid—state drives with M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface. The volume can vary from 256 GB to 2 TB. The manufacturer claims a constant sequential read speed of 3300 Mbps, but the write speed depends on the volume: 1000 Mbps for the younger version and 2900 Mbps for the older ones. In fact, the speed of reading and writing is even slightly higher — 3450 and 3000 MB /s, respectively.

Naturally, as befits an SSD based on 3D TLC flash memory (here it is 64-layer Toshiba/Kioxia), there was no virtual SLC caching algorithm. Its operation is controlled by the Phison E12 controller — a dual-core, eight-channel and generally one of the most powerful among PCI-E 3.0 SSDs. When writing a data volume that is smaller than an SLC array, the speed is 3000 Mbps. And after the array overflow, the speed decreases, but still remains quite high — 1000 Mbps. Then the disk needs time to restore performance.

The Viper VPR100 RGB has a much-coveted separate operational buffer chip, moreover, a fast DDR4 standard and a volume of as much as 1 GB (or rather 512 + 512 MB in dual-channel 16 + 16-bit mode). This allows the drive to produce a record high, as for PCI-E 3.0, IOPS index — up to 700K. And it also has an increased guaranteed rewrite resource — 1600 TB for a terabyte model, which is twice as much as most competitors.

The cherry on the cake of the Viper VPR100 RGB is a metal radiator with LED backlight, and multi-colour RGB and synchronized with the motherboard. Compatibility with ASUS Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light and ASRock Polychrome motherboards has been officially announced, but Biostar Vivid LED DJ will most likely work as well. The backlight is adjusted using the proprietary Viper RGB APP. The manufacturer also reports that when synchronization is turned on, the speed of reading and writing SSD may slow down a little, but in fact the volume of transmitted technical data about the backlight is so small that the speed drop is almost not felt. In the extreme case, synchronization can be disabled, while the Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB will still continue to glow.

The only minor drawback of the drive is its wide radiator, which protrudes a few millimetres beyond the edges of the printed circuit board M.2. In the case of a compact motherboard, it may be difficult to install a graphics card with a thick backplate, but the probability of this is extremely small. In general, the Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB is a very fast (both in megabytes per second and in IOPS), efficiently cooled (the temperature even under load does not exceed 60 °C) and an impressive—looking SSD with an increased rewrite resource. Only newfangled PCI-E Gen4 SSDs are faster than it, such as Patriot Memory Viper VP4100 VP4100-1TBM28H 1 TB Price from 4 475 up to 12 710 ₴ with a speed of 5000/4400 Mbps and 800K IOPS, which are currently supported by only a small number of motherboards.