The Patriot Hellfire M.2 480GB Review: Phison NVMe Tested

Final Words

At the heart of the Patriot Hellfire is Phison's PS5007-E7 controller, their first PCIe NVMe SSD controller. Phison originally intended this to be a high-end controller, but they fell short of that mark — and they didn't just lose against Samsung's controllers. The Patriot Hellfire is the slowest MLC-based NVMe SSD we've tested. But that doesn't mean it's a slow drive overall.

Phison put a ton of effort into optimizing the firmware for the E7 controller, both before and after drives hit the market. The end result is a SSD that always outperforms even the best SATA SSD of comparable capacity. The Patriot Hellfire suffers more than its competitors when nearly full, but the performance hit isn't as large as what TLC-based SSDs show. On longer tests, the Patriot Hellfire lags behind its current competition by a bit, but often still manages to tie or outperform the older Intel SSD 750, which was for a time the fastest (and only) NVMe SSD in the consumer market. For shorter tests under more favorable (and more realistic) conditions, the Patriot Hellfire delivers great performance that is as second only to Samsung's NVMe SSDs.

Despite its imperfections, the Phison E7 controller solution is still a very impressive accomplishment as Phison's first PCIe SSD controller. The only major complaint is power consumption. The Patriot Hellfire was usually among the least efficient of the PCIe SSDs, and PCIe SSDs are already sacrificing efficiency for higher performance relative to SATA SSDs. The most egregious manifestation of this problem is the idle power usage, where the Patriot Hellfire in its lowest power state was still drawing almost twice the power of the next most power-hungry PCIe SSD, and more like 20 times the draw of a decent SATA SSD. This high power consumption not only rules out the Patriot Hellfire and other Phison E7 drives for laptop use, it means the drive is always running a bit on the warm side and is therefore that much closer to thermal throttling. While we did not find throttling to be a problem during typical real-world I/O intensity, I do not think the Patriot Hellfire would fare quite so well in a hot or poorly ventilated spot, such as in a notebook or tucked under a beefy graphics card.

The Patriot Hellfire is just one of several names that Phison's reference design is being sold under. Zotac shipped Phison's HHHL PCIe add-in card design as the Zotac Sonix, while the same M.2 PCB as the Hellfire is also being sold by PNY as the CS2030, MyDigitalSSD's BPX, and Corsair's Force MP500. With essentially the same hardware, all of these drives have the potential to perform almost identically. However, firmware matters a lot, and Patriot is the only vendor that has released a firmware update tool for their Phison E7 SSD. The pace of firmware updates from Phison has slowed down significantly compared to last summer and some of the SSDs haven't been on the market long enough to require a firmware update, but Patriot deserves credit for getting their Phison E7 SSD to market reasonably early and for recognizing that their job didn't end there.

The pricing of the Patriot Hellfire doesn't hold up against the MyDigitalSSD BPX, the cheapest Phison E7 SSD on the market. The latter also offers a 5 year warranty instead of Patriot's 3, which makes the Hellfire a tougher sell for Patriot. Looking outside the Phison club, the Samsung 960 EVO is the next more expensive SSD.

We unfortunately have not had the chance to test the 500 GB 960 EVO, but based on our results with the 250GB and the 1TB, we can draw a few conclusions. First, the superiority of Samsung's controller and 3D NAND means that it's almost untouchable in some synthetic benchmarks. On the other hand, under a sustained write test the 960 EVO's SLC cache will fill up and performance will tank. This is not representative of most real-world workloads and is not reason to disqualify the 960 EVO. In our lightest test of real-world I/O, even the 250GB 960 EVO outperforms the 480GB Patriot Hellfire. For all but the most intense workloads, Samsung's SLC caching will provide better real-world performance than the MLC+Phison combination. And the Samsung drive will draw less power and run cooler while outperforming the Patriot Hellfire.

At current pricing, a Phison E7 SSD might make sense at the 120 GB capacity point where Samsung has no offering, or at higher capacities for workloads that don't play nice with SLC caching. But for the latter, the Plextor M8Pe probably makes more sense. And I'm not sure a 120 GB PCIe SSD makes any sense at all, when a 250 GB 850 EVO is in the same ballpark. The Patriot Hellfire didn't react all that well to being filled, and 120 GB gets crowded fast.