Patriot Viper VPN100 PCIe M.2 SSD Review
Before keyboards, mice and other accessories, Patriot was a flash memory based company. It originally started with RAM and then started to release USB flash drives and eventually started producing SSDs and gaming peripherals. Patriot's Viper product line is considered their top of the line products and meant for those discerning consumers that demand the best. The Viper VPN100 PCIe M.2 SSD is Patriots next entry into the M.2 PCIe drive market. The VPN100 comes in capacities from 256GB all the way to 2 TB and is covered by a 3-year warranty. This drive features a massive heatsink and the drive boasts a 3450 MB/s read speed and 3000 MB/s write speed. The VPN100 uses the latest Phison E12 controller that is PCIe Gen 3 x 4 capable and supports the latest NVMe 1.3 specification.
FEATURES:
• Phison E12 Controller
• 2280 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x 4, NVMe 1.3
• DRAM Cache: 512MB
• External Thermal sensor
• Heatshield design
• Extreme high performance
• Operating Temperature - 0° ~ 70°C
• TBW: 800TB
• 4K Aligned Random Read: up to 700K IOPs
• 4K Aligned Random Write: up to 480K IOPs
• Sequential Read (ATTO): up to 3,300MB/s
• Sequential Write (ATTO): up to 2,200MB/S
• Sequential Read (CDM): up to 3,300MB/s
• Sequential Write (CDM): up to 2,200MB/s
• O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10
*May require driver
Packaging
Patriot's packaging for the Viper VPN100 is eye-catching. On the front of the box, there is a large graphic of the drive. The actual drive capacity is noted by a sticker also located on the front. The back fo the box contains the specifications of the drive in multiple languages.
There's also a front flap that can be opened. Inside the flap, Patriot gives you some information on why the company thinks this drive is the one for you as well as goes into a little more detail on the cooling features of the drive. On the opposite side, you can get a peek at the actual drive housed in a plastic shell.
Upon opening the box, you'll be presented with a plastic shell with the Viper VPN100 drive encased within.
A Closer Look at the Patriot Viper VPN100
The most prominent feature on the drive is the large heatsink applied on top of the controller and memory ICs. The heatsink is made of aluminum and features 10 vertical slots for airflow and the Viper logo in the center.
From the side profile, you can see the heatsink is fairly tall on the Viper VPN100, measuring in at 10mm. That's great for everyone except for those that would like to put this in their laptop. In most cases, this drive won't fit.
On the back of the drive, Patriot put a sticker indicating the drive's capacity and other pertinent information. You can see here that our test sample is the 512 GB version.
After initial testing, I decided to pull the heatsink off the VPN100 to get a look at the controller and memory ICs below. The picks that come in the iFixIt kit were essential to removing the heatsink. I slid the pick between the heatsink and and the modules below it. Good lord, whatever thermal pad they used took forever to clean off from the ICs. Using some isopropyl alcohol and some elbow grease, I still wasn't able to get all of the adhesive off of the ICs. It was stuck on pretty well.
The Viper VPN100 has ICs on only one side. The controller, DRAM, and flash are all located under the heat sink.
The controller for the Viper VPN100 is the newest Phison PS5012-E12 controller. The controller is PCIe 3.0X4 with NVMe 1.3 protocol support. The E12 (non-c variant) can support up to a max capacity of 8 TB. Sequential speeds of 3200 MB/s read and 3000 MB/s write can be obtained using this controller.
Two 256GB 64-layer BICS 3D triple-level cell chips labeled TCBBG55A1 which, are manufactured by Toshiba. The write endurance is rated at 800 TB which is pretty massive for a 512 GB SSD.
Finally, the DRAM is a Nanya 512MB memory chip that is used for caching.
Test Setup & Results
Component
Product Name
Provided By
Processor
Intel Core i7-8700K (Retail)
Intel
Motherboard
Aorus Z390 Pro
Gigabyte
Memory
G.Skill SniperX 2x8GB @ 3400MHz 16-16-16-36 (XMP)
G.Skill
Drive
Patriot Viper VPN100 512 GB NVMe SSD, Samsung 240 EVO 256GB SSD
Patriot/Samsung
Video Card
Zotac Geforce GTX 1080 mini
Zotac
Monitor
BenQ EL2870U 28 inch 4K HDR Gaming Monitor 3840×2160 @ 60 Hz
Case
DimasTech EasyXL
DimasTech
Power Supply
Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W
Cooler Master
Operating System
Windows 10 x64 Pro with latest patches and updates
All of these tests were performed before I removed the heatsink. Additional testing was done after the heatsink was removed. The first round of benchmarks was run with an empty drive. The second round of benchmarks was run with the drive over 75% full. Each benchmark was run three times and we recorded the best overall scores for this review. There were no less than 20 minutes between each benchmark to give the drive time to cool down and rest. A quick side note. The threaded Q-depth tests on the Anvils Storage Utilities named the drive as a Toshiba drive, However, it had the correct letter and capacity.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO Disk Benchmark utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance. However, its more than capable of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of files and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second
Both the fresh out of box and the 75% capacity tests are almost identical with the 75% test just barely ahead. The ATTO tests were able to get extremely close to the manufactures advertised speeds.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD Benchmark is a simple and portable utility which helps you measure the effectiveness and performance of any solid state (SSD) drives connected to your system. It will test “Seq”, “4K”, “4K-64Thrd” and Access Time. In the end, it will give your SSD a score. 4K tests the read/write abilities by access random 4K blocks while the Sequential test measures how fast the drive can read a 1GB file. For AS SSD, we run the SSD benchmark and the Copy Benchmark.
Empty Drive:
75% Capacity
The AS SSD tests came back with 2247.75 MB/s read and 1984.01 MB/s write on the empty drive for the sequential tests. 4K results were 45.63 MB/s read and 117.71 on the write and earned an overall score of 5302. The tests with the drive at 75% resulted in 2250.58 MB/s read and 1982.07 MB/s write in the sequential tests. 4K resulted in 55.40 MB/s read and 146.20 MB/s write speeds with an overall score of 5302. Each of the tests fell a bit short of the manufactures stated sequential read and write speeds.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a powerful performance measurement tool for both traditional hard drives and SSDs. The tool can monitor, and test read and write speeds on hard drives while also providing information from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) that provides basic information about the disk and its parameters, including partitions and volumes.
The ANVIL SSD benchmark resulted in sequential read speed of 3281.40 MB/s read speed and 1984.50MB/s write speeds on the fresh drive with an overall score of 15698.26. The VPN100 at 75% capacity yielded a result of 2301.12 MB/s read and 1984.50 MB/s write speeds and for the first time in our testing scored lower at 14835.12 overall.
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1
CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds.
Crystal Disk Mark is where we see the closest sequential read and write speeds to what the manufacture published. The empty drive resulted in 3469.9 MB/s read and 2101.1 MB/s write speeds. When the drive was filled up to 75% of its total capacity, the read speed came back at 3472.0 MB/s and 2105.3 MB/s on the write speed. 4K speeds were good as well at 966.7 MB/s read and 1952.7 MB/s write on the empty drive compared to 1065.3 MB/s read and 1939.8 MB/write speed when the drive is filled to 75%.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
First, let's get some additional testing out of the way. For this drive specifically, I really wondered if the heatsink was necessary. The drive is fast and from the results so far, meets the specifications listed. I reinstalled the drive in an open slot below the GPU with no heatsink installed, including the SSD covers that come with the Aorus Z390 Pro motherboard and I ran through some tests once more. The results were similar to the results that were obtained with the heatsink installed. During this test, I also pulled up AIDA 64 to monitor temperatures as the controller has a max operating temperature of 70°C. During the non-heatsink tests, I saw a max temperature of 50°C and 53°C during an extended write test using HDDTune. With the heatsink installed, I observed temperatures of 45°C during our standard test suite and an absolute max of 47°C in the extended write testing. Take into consideration these tests were performed on an open test bench and not in a standard PC case or a laptop. Even then, I would think it would be safe to say the SSD would keep temperatures down below the throttling threshold.
The Patriot Viper VPN100 is armed with the latest controller from Phison and the latest 3D NAND from Toshiba. The pairing results in great speeds for the drive. In my testing, I was able to easily eclipse 2 GB/s write speeds and 3 GB/s read speeds. I do feel the packaging on the Viper VPN100 is slightly misleading. The box does say up to 3000 MB/s write however, that's only on the 1 and 2 TB models and yet those specifications persist on the smaller capacity drives as well. You'll have to dig into the product documentation for the actual specifications. Shame on me, as I did make the fatal mistake of believing the box vs reading the product documentation when I first started testing the drive.
The Viper VPN is a fast and stable drive. I continue to try to heat it up and get it to throttle but as of yet, I have been unable to do so with the heatsink off. So, if you feel like pulling that massive hunk of aluminum off, you can slide this drive into your laptop. As of this writing, the Viper VPN512 GB model can be had for $83 on Amazon with the 1TB slightly more at $145. Combine the pricing with the speeds and you've got a drive that is hard to beat.
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