Patriot Viper VP4100 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD Review

The drive comes in a stout, compact box finished in matt red and black, with a large image of the drive on the front. Below the image are the Sequential speed figures for the drive; up to 5,000MB/s reads and up to 4,400MB/s for writes. Under these figures is a sticker displaying the drive's capacity.

The rear of the box is covered by multilingual lists, highlighting a few of the drive's specifications.

The front of the box is actually a hinged cover, opening it reveals the drive sitting in its plastic protection shell, either side of which are repeated the Sequential performance figures. The rear of the cover has marketing text about the drive, including the fact it uses a Phison E16 controller and it comes with a five year warranty.

Built on a 2280 M.2 format, the VP4100 is a doubled-sided design, i.e. components on both sides of the PCB. To prevent the drive from overheating when dealing with heavy workloads it uses a combination of an external thermal sensor and a well-designed aluminium heatsink. Even with the heatsink, the overall height of drive is just 7mm.

Under the heatsink are the Phison PS5016-E16 controller, two 256GB packages of Toshiba BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND (coded TABBG65AWV) and a 512MB (SK hynix H5AN4G8NBJR-UHC) cache IC. On the flip side of the PCB are another pair of 256GB NAND packages together with a second 512MB cache IC.

Phison's PS5016-E16 is the world's first PCIe Gen4 x4 controller. Built on a 28nm process using a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 processor, the 8-channel PS5016-E16 supports 3D and QLC NAND at maximum speed of 800MT/s per channel.

It supports Phison's 4th generation LDPC ECC engine to protect data and also features integrated End-to-END data protection. Security is further enhanced with support for TCG, Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase technologies.

Patriot’s SSD management software, the Patriot PCIe Tool Box (v1.3), looks a pretty basic utility compared to some of its competitor's offerings but it really does offer all you really need to keep an eye on your drive.

It shows information on firmware version, serial number, total capacity, endurance, power-on time, if TRIM is enabled, and SMART data. It also allows the secure erase of the drive and updates to the drive’s firmware.

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