Patriot Display Scorch M.2 NVMe SSD at CES 2018

We visited Patriot at CES 2018 and took a look at their storage drives. Among them is the Scorch M.2 NVMe solid state drive which will be released shortly. It is already listed on the official website which means it is possible for you to check out for details.

Patriot Scorch M.2 NVMe SSD

Patriot’s Scorch drive is a mainstream drive as seen by the performance. It is capable of up to 1700MB/s when reading sequential data and up to 950MB/s when writing. The random read performance is rated at 200K IOPS while the random write performance is rated up to 115K IOPS. While those speeds aren’t groundbreaking, they are far from bad. Especially users on SATA SSDs will notice the difference when upgrading to something like the Scorch M.2 SSD.

Now, keen eyes will spot that the photo shows a Hellfire M.2 drive and not a Scorch. Whether that’s a mistake or someone swapped out the drive is unknown. Either way, there isn’t a lot of difference. The Scorch looks the same, only the sticker says scorch and has the appropriate details.

Controller and NAND

Patriot’s Scorch is built with Phison’s 5008 controller which is the newest mainstream NVMe controller from Phison. There are two versions of the controller, a main and a light version. The main version supports DRAM cache while the lite version doesn’t. Patriot’s Scorch is using the main version and the drive comes with 256MB DRAM cache.

The NAND used isn’t specified, but it’s a fair guess that it will be Toshiba’s BiCS TLC NAND as that’s what the controller is intended for.

Availability and Pricing

We currently do not know when the drive will be available, except ‘shortly’. As for the price, expect it to be priced very competitively and very tempting when compared to SATA SSD pricing.