Patriot Scorch 512GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD Review

Introduction Patriot Scorch 512GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD NVMe SSDs are no longer reserved for the high-end market as they once were. We've seen more entries into the budget-end recently and today I'm taking a closer look at such a solution. On the test-bench is the Patriot Scorch NVMe SSD with a capacity of 512GB (product link). The Scorch is an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen.3 x 2 NVMe 1.2 drive. With just 2 PCIe lanes, it's slower than a lot of other drives, but it's still faster than its SATA brothers. Scorch Hardware Components Patriot chose some well-known components for their drive. There is the Phison E8 (PS5008-E8) controller which is coupled with Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash. There's also a 512MB DRAM cache on the 512GB version of the drive to aid in the performance. In other words, the drive is made up of four Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS chips, one Nanya DDR3L cache chip, and the Phison E8 controller. The whole thing is a single sided design which makes it compatible with any system that can accommodate a 2280-sized PCIe drive. Performance As I started out by mentioning, the Scorch is a PCIe 3.0 x2 drive. That means that it won't reach the performance figures of the high-end x4 drives. Still, with a sequential performance of up to 1700MB/s when reading and 950MB/s when writing isn't bad at all. The random performance is rated at 200,000 and 115,000 IOPS when reading and writing. So, while you don't get top-of-the-line performance, you get more than any SATA-based drive can offer. And you get it without paying the premium costs of a premium drive. Endurance The endurance is just as important as the performance, if not more. Patriot rates the Scorch series for 75 TBW (Terabytes Written) for every 128GB capacity. Thereby, the 512GB model I have in the office today comes in with a 300TB TBW rating. The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is a standard 2 million hours while Patriot backs the drive with a 3-year warranty. SSD Features With End-to-End datapath protection, Smart Refresh, and SmartECC, the Scorch offers the features you'll want. Static and advanced wear-levelling, advanced garbage collection, TRIM support, bad block management, and S.M.A.R.T technologies are built-in. What Does Patriot Have to Say About this Drive? "The Patriot Scorch M.2 Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) SSD is the perfect solution for consumers and professionals looking to get blazingly fast startup times and instantaneous access to their data for better productivity and reliability from their SSD." "To ensure the Patriot Scorch M.2 SSD provides rock-solid performance, static and advanced wear-levelling, advanced garbage collection, TRIM support, bad block management and S.M.A.R.T technologies are built in." Feature Highlights Phison 5008 Series Controller 2280 M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x 2, NVMe 1.2 DRAM Cache: 512MB End-to-End Datapath Protection Smart Refresh SmartECC Package and Accessories The Scorch SSD comes in a hang-card packaging, much like you're used to from flash drives and memory cards. You can see the included drive and all the vital features are printed on the front. The rear side has more details and fine-print for those interested. Inside the hand-card is a plastic box with the drive. Testing & Methodology In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology that will give us the maximum amount of data. While this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer – easily up 36 hours – the overall picture that we can gather is bigger too. It helps both you as the reader and us as the reviewer’s to gain a clearer view of the drive’s overall performance, strengths, and weaknesses. It also provides a more accurate analysis of how each drive performs under different conditions. Data Fillage There are many ways to test a storage drive, and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various village scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. Testing this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Application and Gaming Besides these synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results. Plain Drive Performance Following the fillage tests, the partition gets removed, and we check the drive’s raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware’s capabilities while eliminating any interference from the set file system. AIDA64’s storage benchmark and IOmeter are both great tools for this, and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. The IOmeter tests I run are quite different from the rest as they will give a final result after a longer performance test rather than a maximum or average score; this gives us yet another view of the tested drive over the regular tests. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews even tho it would take years to simulate this under real-world conditions. Luckily, Anvil’s Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test that can perform this action much faster, but it is still a time-consuming process. Depending on the hardware, this can easily take several days, and we write thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility to drive over and over. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. This will give us a great view of how a drive will perform after prolonged usage, and that is a very vital factor when you pick out your storage drive. The Preparation and In Between The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn't used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted result screenshots from the benchmarks, created drive analysis chart for the fill-level performance, and added drive comparison charts where possible. Hardware Supermicro C7Z270-PG Intel Core i7-7700K Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB) Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W) Noctua NH-D15S Cooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Benchmark CrystalDiskMark IOMeter PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark Windows 10 AIDA64 AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I'll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Performance Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive's consistency. The straight line and a higher average performance are the things to look for here. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. It also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to deliver days, months, and potentially even years of use in a shorter period. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Performance Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive's consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. AS SSD Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren't using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive's consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive's consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive's sequential and random performance. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive's consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. IOMeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterisation tool for single and clustered systems. As a benchmark and troubleshooting tool, it is configurable to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. Sequential Performance Random 4K Performance Drive Comparison IOmeter is run on an unpartitioned drive. PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark PCMark 8 Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and SSHD hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, PCMark runs with an empty drive. Final Thoughts Pricing and Availability At the time of this review, Patriot's Scorch with 512GB capacity is available through Amazon for just $144.99. The UK version of Amazon only has the 128GB drive listed at the time of this review. That drive can be yours for £59.99. You can also get it directly from Patriot for $179.99. Design There isn't a lot to say about the design as such. Patriot's Scorch is a plain module in a standard form factor. The single-sided design prevents any interference with other components in very tightly-designed systems. The module features a large white sticker which covers all the components. The package also paints us a picture. It isn't flashy at all and comes with no extras. While that is true, it also shows a future where NVMe SSDs are treated like USB drives and memory cards today. They become something hanging in shops which you just pick up when you need it and not something you consider long and hard about getting. Performance and Endurance Patriot's Scorch didn't hit any top marks in our benchmarks, but that was to be expected. It only utilises half the lanes of most other drives, which in itself explains it. While that is true, something else is also true. The Scorch is a lot cheaper than a lot of other drives. You get 512GB of NVMe storage for less than $150 bucks. In other words, you get your NVMe storage for just $0.28 per GB. The endurance isn't something you should worry about when comparing it to other SSDs. It comes with about the same ratings as we generally see. It's also backed by a 3-year warranty. We didn't see any real impact from the conditioning of the drive either. So I can put your mind at ease in that regard. That isn't where the money was saved. Pros High capacity for little money Good performance, better than SATA SSDs Standard 2280 form factor for optimal compatibility Cons Slower than PCIe x4 drive s, but also cheaper "Patriot offers a lot of NVMe capacity for very little money with their Scorch M.2 SSD. Forget SATA SSDs, join the NVMe movement with the Scorch." We would like to thank Patriot for this sample.