Patriot Viper VPN110 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

For years the storage subsystem in PCs was a huge bottleneck when it came to performance.  You could be running the latest processor and still get terrible application performance due to how it takes to get data to and from drive.  There were ways around that including RAID arrays and faster drives but, it was the launch of SSDs that finally increased responsiveness to the point where storage is rarely an issue.

In this review we will be looking at a new M.2 NVMe SSD from Patriot called the Viper Gaming VPN110.  This is the performance oriented NVMe SSD from Viper Gaming that capacities of 512GB, 1TB and 2TB.  While this drive is not the fastest in the Patriot lineup it is no slouch with Sequential Read and Write performance up to 3300MB/s.

By now most hardware enthusiasts know about NVMe SSDs and the benefits the NVMe controller brings to flash-based storage systems.  What is new in this arena is the transfer rate due to the PCI Express generation.  PCI Express Gen3 is the defacto standard when it comes to NVMe performance and while you can buy drives using PCI Express Gen4 there are plenty of instances where modern systems still have PCI Express Gen3 support and can benefit from extremely fast and lesser expensive storage solutions.

Eg. The storage drive in your main gaming rig.

NVMe or Non-Volatile Memory Express is an SSD specification for drives connected directly to the PCI Express bus.  They work much like a standard SSD but take advantage of low latency parallelism of PCI Express and allow the SSD drives to move data extremely fast by splitting the transfer over different paths.  This drive is using the NVMe 1.3 standard with an M.2 2280 form factor.

One thing to remember is that NVMe is simply a specification which is being updated all the time to both increase performance and longevity. The interface can offer performance gains but the controller and NAND chips are where the real performance is.

• Latest Gen3x 4 Controller
• 2280 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x 4, NVMe 1.3
• DRAM Cache: size depending on drive capacity
• Innovative heatshield design
• Extreme high performance
• Operating Temperature - 0° ~ 70°C
• TBW: 800TB
• 4K Aligned Random Read: up to 500K IOPs
• 4K Aligned Random Write: up to 500K IOPs
• Sequential Read (ATTO): up to 3,300MB/s
• Sequential Write (ATTO): up to 3,000MB/S
• Sequential Read (CDM): up to 3,300MB/s
• Sequential Write (CDM): up to 3,000MB/s
• O/S Supported: Windows 7*/8.0*/8.1/10