Patriot officially announced the Hellfire SSDs back in January, but we hadn’t actually seen the drives up until now. That changed at Computex where we got to see both version of the drive, both the PCIe add-in card and the M.2 module that both sport the same performance and specifications.
The Patriot Hellfire PCIe add-in card retains the same specifications and ratings as they were when it was introduced a few months back. It runs on the Phison 5007 controller which is paired with MLC-type NAND and backed by a 512MB DDR3 cache. It will be available as 480GB and 960GB versions and it’s rated for up to 3000MB/s reading and 2200MB/s writing. The drive is optimized for sequential performance from the looks of it as the random read performance only is rated at 150K IOPS. On the other hand, the drive is just as strong at random write operations as it is on sequential where it is rated for over to 200K IOPS.
The M.2 version has the same performance ratings, but it will also be available as a 240GB version on top of the 480GB and 960GB. The Hellfire drive is using the NVMe 1.2 specifications, which is why it can deliver such a good performance. In the initial information a few month back, this drive was only rated for 600MB/s write performance, so it looks like Patriot got that part fixed since then.
It isn’t just about next-generation at Patriot either and they also brought along their newest SATA3 SSD family member, the 2TB Ignite SATA3 SSD. That is a lot of capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor and especially when it’s NAND. We have finally reached the point where SSDs rival HDDs on capacity, even when it comes to mainstream. 2TB capacity is what you currently get from 2.5-inch mechanical drives and now you can get that with SSD performance too.
The Ignite 2TB drive reaches sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s and write speeds of up to 500MB/s and it will be available for purchase starting in the 4th Quarter of 2016.
Not as impressive as the 2TB version, but still nice, is the 960GB version of the Ignite. We recently reviewed the 480GB version and it is a really great drive. The 960GB version is already widely available.
Take my money and give me that shiny 2TB SSD.