Patriot Viper VPN100 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review

Patriot Viper VPN100 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review SSDs aren't all equal and Patriot surely proves that with their VPN100 M.2 NVMe SSD. Today I'm taking exactly this drive with a 1TB capacity and put it under the microscope to check how well it performs. Patriot Viper VPN100 Just by looking at the Viper VPN, you know that this isn't your everyday SSD. Well, within it is - but it sure doesn't look like it. The huge heatsink which is placed on top of the drive gives it a height of 105mm. While that's large, it sure looks good. The Viper VPN100 is built with a Phison E12 controller, 3D TLC NAND, and DRAM cache of 512MB on the 1TB model. Besides this 1TB drive, there's also 256GB, 500GB, and a 2TB versions to chose from. Naturally, the drive is based on the PCIe Gen3 x4 and comes with NVMe 1.3 support. Aside from the heatsink, it's a standard 2280 M.2 module which will slot right into your motherboard. Performance and Endurance Patriot's Viper VPN100 isn't just a drive that looks great, it promises a performance to match. It is rated for sequential performance of up to 3450MB/s when reading and 3000MB/s when writing. The random performance is at least as impressive with figures of 600K IOPS for both reading and writing 4K data. Endurance is at least as important as performance. After all, you don't want your drive to stop working before you replace it with something better. Patriot rates the drive with a Mean Time Before Failure of 2 million hours and it has a TBW rating up to 3200TB. Last but not least, you get a 3-year warranty. Heatsink, Do We Need It? The amount of data which is pushed through a drive with this kind of performance results in a lot heat generation from the controller. To prevent damage, they feature thermal throttling which will kick in if it runs above safe temperatures. That's a great feature as it prevents damage to the drive, but it's also an annoying feature as you might lose speed when you need it the most. That's why more and more drives come with built-in heatsink. While I've seen and tested other M.2 drives with a heatsink, I think this is the largest I've seen so far. And I don't mind, it isn't in the way. The heatsink on the Viper VPN100 is made of aluminium and features 6 thermal fins for excellent thermal dissipation. While all drives have an internal temperature sensor, the VPN100 also features an external sensor. This allows the drive to find the perfect balance between performance and heat. Feature Highlights Up to 3450MB/s and 600K IOPS performance3200TB TBW rating for maximum enduranceUp to 2TB CapacityBuilt-in Aluminium heatsink Specifications Package and Accessories Despite the physical size of the drive, when compared to a bare M.2 drive, the VPN100 comes in a relative small package. The black and red as well as the overall design screams performance. A great representation of what you get. The front has an image representation of the included drive along with the performance figures and capacity. On the rear, you find a few more details in various languages. This includes a link to the homepage where you can find more information about the drive. The front can be opened up like a book, giving you a look at the included drive. Here you also get a description of the drive, what Patriot has to say about it. 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 i7-7700KCrucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-D15SCooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkIOMeterPCMark 8 Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 AIDA64 Storage Benchmark 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 Analysis Anvil's Storage Benchmark 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 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 Storage 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 Drive 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 Disk Benchmark 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 Drive 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 Drive 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. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. 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, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. Pricing and Final Thoughts Patriot's Viper VPN100 1TB NVMe SSD can be yours for just $199.99 at the time of this review. It wasn't listed in the UK yet, but that will hopefully change soon. I'm sure there are a lot out there who would like this drive! Final Thoughts The Viper VPN100 from Patriot is an epic NVMe SSD, there can be no doubt about that. It looks fierce and perfoms with impressive results. Patriot attached one of the biggest heatsinks I've seen on an M.2 drive to the Viper VPN100. And in my book, that's a great thing - at least if you don't plan on putting this drive into a notebook or a motherboard with built-in heatsink for the M.2 slots. It will help keep the drive cool and running at top speeds even when you're taxing it and the rest of the system to the max. We really don't need to talk much about the performance here; the numbers speak for themselves. We're in the top-end of the charts in nearly every test. Pros Great PerformanceGood lookingLarge heatsinkUp to 2TB capacityHigh Endurance Rating Cons None "Patriot delivers impressive performance, good cooling, and an impressive look with their Viper VPN100 SSD." Patriot Viper VPN100 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review Thank you Patriot for providing us with this sample.