Patriot P300 (Regional) 1TB NVMe SSD Review

In the recent past we've looked at drives from Patriot's Gaming product line; the VPN100, VPR100 and the mighty PCIe Gen4 VP4100. This time we get to look at a drive from the other end of the food chain, the entry-level P300 from the standard Patriot range.

There are two distinct versions of the P300 drive, US and Regional. The US version uses a PS5013-E13T controller while the Regional version uses a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller. Regardless of which controller, the drive uses 96-layer 3D TLC NAND and is a DRAMless design that relies on HMB (Host Memory Buffer) technology for caching duties. Five drives make up the P300 product line; 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB (the drive Patriot kindly supplied for review) and a flagship 2TB model.

Performance-wise the 1TB P300 is rated as up to 2,100MB/s and 1,650MB/s for Sequential read/writes respectively. When we tested the drive with the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite reach those maximum official numbers, with reads of 1,970MB/s and writes at 1,610MB/s. However, using our own Sequential benchmarks we could indeed confirm the Patriot figures with tested read performance of 2,137MB/s and writes at 1,836MB/s.

The 1TB drive is rated as up to 290,000 IOPs for random reads while writes are up to 260,000 IOPS. However, using our standard 4-threaded tests we couldn't get close to either of those official maximums. The best read figure we got was 108,351 IOPS at a QD of 16 while the best write figure was a low 56,898 IOPS at a queue depth of 32. However, a quick test using 8 threads at a queue depth of 32 yielded a read result of 243,794 IOPS and a write score of 236,662 IOPS, much closer to those official scores.

One other thing to note is that the P300 doesn't have any software management utility to support it which is a bit of a shame.

We found the 1TB P300 Regional Edition on CCL Computers for £114.93 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Sequential performance.
• Single-sided layout.

Cons

• Tested 4K results were disappointing against the official ratings.
• Lack of software management utility.
• Only a 3-year warranty.

KitGuru says: The P300 is a decent enough drive but it's aimed at an extremely competitive market segment which already contains some very well known, better-performing drives. It could do with a bit of tweaking to the price to give it a better chance.

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