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Patriot's latest addition to its SSD family is the high-performance Viper VP4300. The company's second-generation PCIe Gen4 drive uses a combination of an Innogrit controller and 3D TLC NAND, making it the fastest Viper SSD Patriot has launched to date. We review the 2TB model, priced at £380 MSRP.
Patriot's Viper VP4300 takes over from the VP4100 (reviewed here) as the flagship drive family in the Viper gaming product line. At launch, there are only two capacities in the range, 1TB and the flagship 2TB drive we are looking at here. The drives' use an Innogrit IG5236 PCIe Gen4 x4 controller in combination with 3D TLC NAND and DDR4 cache.
Patriot quotes Sequential performance figures for the drives using both ATTO and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks although both sets of figures are the same. The 2TB drive is rated at up to 7,400MB/s for reads and up to 6,800MB/s for writes while the 1TB drive has the same read figure but with writes rated at up to 5,800 MB/s. Random read/write performance for both drives is up to 800,000 IOPS for both reads and writes.
The drive comes bundled with two heatsinks, one is thin and made from graphene and the other a much bulkier version made from aluminium.
In terms of endurance, the TBW figure for the 2TB drive is quoted as up to 2,000TB with the 1TB rated as up to 1,000TB. Patriot backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Innogrit IG5236.
- Cache: DDR4.
- Interface: PCIe Gen4 x4.
- Form Factor: M.2 2280.
- Drive Weight: 25g
Firmware Version: V1.1A
The drive comes in a stout, compact box finished in matt red and black, with a large image of the drive on the front along with the two heatsinks that come with the drive. Below the image are the Sequential speed figures for the drive: up to 7,400MB/s reads and up to 6,800MB/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 comes with two styles of heatsink, a thin graphene one for notebook installations and a bulkier aluminium one more suited to desktops.
Built on a 2280 M.2 format, the 2TB VP4300 uses a 10-layer PCB (to provide better signal integrity for improved stability) and is a double-sided design, i.e. components on both sides of the PCB. One side of the PCB holds the Innogrit IG5236 controller, two 3D TLC NAND packages and a DDR4 cache IC. On the other side of the board are another couple of NAND packages and a second DDR4 cache chip.
We've never come across an Innogrit controller before but the IG5236 is an 8-channel controller that can handle up to 8TB of MLC, TLC or QLC NAND.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4-2400, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi motherboard.
Other drives
Corsair Force MP600 1TB
Patriot Viper VPN4100 1TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB
Samsung SSD980 PRO 1TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB
Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 1TB
WD Black SN850 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 6.0 & 8.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
Futuremark PC Mark 10.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v7.0 and v8.0 for our Gen4 testing.
The Viper VP4300 doesn't seem to handle the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 T1 test as well as the previous generation VP4100. However, we can confirm the official Sequential performance ratings of the drive, up to 7,400MB/s for reads and up to 6,800MB/s for writes with the tested drive producing figures of 7,479.5MB/s and 6,800MB/s for reads and writes respectively.
Looking at both benchmark result screens it appears that the Innogrit IG5236 controller doesn't have a preference when it comes to the type of data it's being asked to work with.
CrystalDiskMark v8
Once again we could confirm the official Sequential performance figures using the NVMe setting included in CrystalDiskMark 8. In the Peak Performance profile, we saw random 4K performance figures of 640,729.74 IOPS for reads and 631,502.20 IOPS for writes but both of these figures are some way off the official up to 800,000 IOPS read/write ratings.
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 customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
We are using version 4.0 for our Gen4 drive testing.
Officially the 2TB Patriot Viper VP4300 is rated at up to 7,400MB/s for reads and 6,800MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t quite reach those maximums, but the 6,920MB/s read figure we did achieve is the fastest we have seen to date for a Gen 4 SSD. Sequential writes came in at 6,340MB/s, a fair bit off the official figure.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The ASSSD benchmark read score of 2515 is only good enough to put the Viper VP4300 in the bottom half of our result chart. However, its write score of 2999 is the third-fastest we've seen to date for a Gen4 drive.
IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool that is able to simulate the various loads placed on the hard drive and solid-state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
128KB Sequential Read / Write setup.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 10 minutes per test
With our own Sequential testing, we could confirm the 7,400MB/s official maximum with a test result of 7,464.95MB/s. The write score of 6,772.1MB/s was a little shy of the official 6,800MB/s.
128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD compared.
In the Sequential read tests, the Viper VP4300 is the fastest Gen4 drive we've seen so far at QD1. At QDs 2 and 4, it drops down the chart but it's back on top of the chart with the QD32 result.
128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD compared.
As with the Sequential read results, at QD1 the Viper VP4300 is the fastest drive we've seen up till now. The performance in comparison to the drives around it drops in QD2 but recovers so that in the QD4 and QD32 tests it is only beaten by the 4TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus.
IOMeter test setup:
4K Sustained Random Read
Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test
Patriot rate the Viper VP4300's 4K random read performance as up to 800,000 IOPS. With our 4-threaded tests, we couldn't get close to that figure, the best we saw was 378,835 IOPS (QD16). We did run a quick test at QD32 using 8 threads and got a result of 465,446.8 IOPS, much improved but still way off that maximum figure.
4K Random Read v QD Performance compared.
In comparison with the other drives we've tested the Viper VP4300's strongest performance comes at QD1, but as the queue depth deepens the drive falls down the chart. It is still a good deal faster than the previous generation Viper VP4100, but at QD32 the situation is switched around, with the VP4100 having the advantage.
IOMeter test setup:
4K Sustained Random Write.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test.
The official Viper VP4300 random write performance is rated the same as the random read's, 800,000 IOPS. As with our random read tests, we couldn't get close to that figure, the best we saw was 350,649 IOPS (QD16). Once again we did a quick test at QD32 using 8 threads and got a result of 536,228.1 IOPS.
4K Random Write v QD Performance compared.
In comparison with other Gen4 drives we've tested, the Viper VP4300 performs the best at QDs 2 (where only Samsung's SSD980 PRO beats it) and 32 where it lies in second place on our results chart, behind the WD Black SN850.
IOMeter test setup:
Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes
The drive delivers strong performance in our 4K 70/30 read/write mixed tests, finishing the test run (QD32) at 368,766 IOPS (1,510.46MB/s).
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Reads
The 2TB Patriot Viper VP4300 read performance climbs smoothly throughout the tested queue depths and threads with a peak performance figure of 344,813 IOPS (1,412MB/s) at QD8 using 4 threads.
Random Writes
In the write tests, the best performance figure we saw was the 348,998 IOPS (1,429MB/s) using 4 threads at a QD of 8.
In our read throughput test the drive peaks at the end of the test at 5,406.04MB/s, a long way short of the official maximum of 7,400MB/s. It is, however, the third-fastest drive we've seen to date in our test, behind the WD Black SN850 and the 2TB version of Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus drive.
In our write throughput test, the drive peaked at the 8MB block mark at 5,834.85MB/s before slipping back to finish the test run at 5,024.58MB/s. That peak figure is well short of the official maximum of 6,800MB/s but it does make the VP4300 the second-fastest drive we've seen in this test after the 4TB version of Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus drive.
For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 2TB Patriot Viper VP4300 averaged 99,966 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 69%
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
The Patriot Viper VP4300 had no problem dealing with PCMark10’s Full System Drive benchmark with good performance figures for all the test traces. The standout figure in the creative tests is the 921MB/s for the Heavy Use Adobe Photoshop trace. It also performed very well in the file transfer tests with an impressive 4,363MB/s for the cp1 write test.
Overall the Patriot Viper VP4300 performs well in PCMark10’s Full System Drive benchmark with an overall bandwidth score of 453.22 MB/s, second only to WD's Black SN850 drive and 88.8MB/s faster than the previous generation Viper VP4100.
To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
We use the following folder/file types
- 100GB data file.
- 60GB iso image.
- 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
- 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
- 12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
- 10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
- 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
- 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
- BluRay Movie – 42GB.
- 21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
- 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
- 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
- 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The Patriot Viper VP4300 dealt with our real-life file transfers without any problems, showing very good consistency of performance for both reads and writes when dealing with the larger file sizes, averaging 518MB/s when writing to the drive and 444MB/s when reading the data back. As usual, it’s the small files in the Audio, Steam and File folders that cause the drive to slow down.
To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:
Switching over to an all NVMe storage environment saw transfer speeds for the large file transfers rocket and times taken drop dramatically with the Viper VP4300. Six of the transfers topped well over 2.5GB/s for writing to the drive with four just a shade under 3GB/s.
The PCIe Gen4 SSD market is slowly gathering momentum with some of the early adopters now bringing second-generation drives on-stream.
Patriot was early to the table with the Viper VP4100 and now we have the second generation Viper VP4300. Up until now the Gen4 drives we've looked at either have in-house controllers (WD and Samsung) or a controller from Phison (the E16 or for more performance, the latest E18 chip) but for the Viper VP4300, Patriot has opted for a third option, by using a controller from a company called Innogrit.
The Viper VP4300 uses an Innogrit IG5236 PCIe Gen4 x4 controller. Although this is the first time we've seen the IG5236 (code-named Rainier), Innogrit have both PCIe Gen 3 (x2 and x4 products) and Gen4 controllers in their product portfolio (there is an enterprise version of the IG5236 as well). The 8-channel IG5236 is built on a 12nm FinFET process and has a connect speed of 1200MT/s. It can support up to 8TB of storage (the enterprise version can handle double this) including MLC, TLC and QLC with either ONFI 4.1 or Toggle 2.0/3.0/4.0. Peak power consumption is stated at 3W.
Patriot quotes Sequential performance figures for the 2TB version of the Viper VP4300 as up to 7,400MB/s for reads and up to 6,800MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit either maximum for the drive. However, the 6,920MB/s we did achieve for Sequential reads is the fastest we've seen for a Gen4 drive to date. On the other hand, the 6,340MB/s tested write figure is some way short of that official maximum. We could, however, confirm both official Sequential ratings using the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark with the drive producing a read figure of 7,478MB/s and 6,787MB/s for writes.
As for 4K random performance, Patriot quotes figures of up to 800,000 IOPS for both reads and writes. The best figures we saw from the drive under testing came from using the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 with a read test results of 640,729.74 IOPS with writes at 631,502.20 IOPS, both of which are far away from the official maximum IOPS figures.
Patriot bundle two heatsinks with the drive, one is very thin and constructed from graphene, which is just the job if you are thinking about using the drive in a notebook. The other is aimed at desktop use as it's more of a conventional design and made from aluminium. Or for extra cooling in a desktop environment, you could use both of them together.
Patriot's Viper VP4300 sees another controller manufacturer enter the fray and if the performance of the VP4300 is anything to go by, it's an impressive chip. This second-generation Patriot drive's performance is a leap forward from the previous flagship Gen 4 drive, the Viper VP4100.
At launch, the 2TB Patriot Viper VP4300 has an MSRP of £379.99.
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Pros
- Sequential performance.
- Choice of heatsinks.
- Competitive pricing.
Cons
- Couldn’t match the official random write figures under testing.
- Needs a PCIe 4.0 supporting motherboard for best performance.
KitGuru says: Patriot's second-generation Gen4 SSD ably takes over the flagship mantle from the previous generation Viper VP4100, and with over 7GB/s + 6GB/s performance for Sequential reads and writes respectively, it shows the increased performance compared to the first generation of Gen4 drives.
