The Patriot Hellfire M.2 480GB Review: Phison NVMe Tested
by Billy Tallis on February 10, 2017 8:30 AM ESTATTO
ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.
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With write speeds that exceed 2.3 GB/s and read speeds that almost hit 3 GB/s, the Patriot Hellfire has no trouble delivering very high performance on shorter tests and with compressible data. Performance scales well with transfer size until around 64 kB, after which it takes quite a while for performance to fully saturate.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.
The Patriot Hellfire can't quite keep up with Samsung's latest generation, but it still ties or slightly beats the rest of the competition even though the use of incompressible data slows it down some.
Idle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. We report two measures of idle power consumption: active idle where the SSD is not in use but has not been put in to any low-power sleep state, and idle power consumption in the deepest sleep state supported by our testbed. For NVMe SSDs, the lowest drive power state is measured but PCIe Active State Power Management (ASPM) is not used due to limitations of this motherboard. For SATA SSDs, aggressive link power management is used to put the SATA link into slumber state. Many SSDs support a deeper DevSleep state, but this cannot be engaged using ordinary desktop platforms.
The Patriot Hellfire has by far the worst power management, and is barely able to get below 1 W even in the deepest low-power state. If NVMe power saving is not used, the Hellfire never drops below 2 W. This means the Hellfire starts out any performance test far closer to thermal throttling than any other SSD. (The OCZ RD400A is using slightly more power than the Hellfire because of the overhead of its 12V to 3.3V conversion circuit.)
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KAlmquist - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
"...a Phison E7 SSD might make sense at the 120 GB capacity point where Samsung has no offering..."IF the performance of the 120 GB version is close to that of the 480 GB drive. It appears that Patriot isn't sending the lower capacity drives out to reviewers. The link given below reports that the 240 GB model providing about 86% of the speed of the 480 GB model. That number may not be terribly meaningful because the reported speeds vary a lot (presumably because some drives were fuller than others when the benchmarks were run), but it seems to be the best data we have. The law of diminishing returns suggests that the performance gap between the 120 and 240 GB models will be greater than the gap between the 240 and 480 GB models. So it seems quite possible that the 120 GB model is a real dog.
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/184918/Patr...
HideOut - Friday, February 10, 2017 - link
So why is a supposedly leading tech site doing their review on Windows 8.1? There are already features and such unusable if you don't have 10Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 11, 2017 - link
We're purposely slow to switch OSes so that we can work out the kinks first. Win10 has taken a bit of time to get to place nicely with our SSD tests, though we should be ready to finally roll it out in the next couple of months.HomeworldFound - Sunday, February 12, 2017 - link
That basically means in several years when nobody is reading any more.Billy Tallis - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
After this review, I have two engineering samples and one retail drive that I'll be reviewing with the 2015 test suite, and then I'll be switching over to the 2017 test suite using Windows 10. If all goes well and if I get enough of the back catalog of drives re-tested with the new suite in time, the WD Black may even get reviewed with the new test suite and the 2015 data will just go into the Bench archives.But you're probably overestimating how important the switch to Windows 10 is for SSD reviews. The Windows 10 NVMe driver still sucks.
leexgx - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
windows 10 provides inconsistent results (unless you disable everything or use windows 10 LTSB and still disable everything) where as you can use windows 8 and have consistent resultsfanofanand - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
Newegg has a 1 TB Mushkin Reactor for $229.99 today. Until Nvme prices come down (the increase appears to be completely artificial as they are not more expensive to make) I will be on the sidelines enjoying my "slow" Sata 3 SSD.chlamchowder - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
Interesting how several sites tested this drive, and:-AT criticizes it for being the slowest MLC NVMe SSD and not being price compeitive with the MyDigitalSSD BPX
-Tomshardware also criticized pricing, wrt the 950 Pro (but they also had data on the BPX and showed the Hellfire slightly ahead)
-thessdreview praises it for getting close to the 960 Pro and RD400 while being less expensive
Everyone's probably right at once. From AT's price table, it looks like the Hellfire is a decent PCIe entry at 480 GB. It's cheaper than drives that outperform it while beating the cheaper BPX and 600p.
But I don't think NVMe M.2 drives are worth it right now. They're expensive, power hungry, run hot, and are harder to cool (especially next to a graphics card). I have the M8pe, and it's often hard to feel the difference compared to a good MLC SATA drive. If software changes direction to be far more IO heavy it could be worth it.
ravansranu - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Ipl T20 2017 is likely to be scheduled to start from April 3rd 2017 to May 26th, 2017. While, opening ceremony and final match of IPL 2017 is to be placed on Eden Gardens, Kolkata.https://iplilive.org
FrogSpawn - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Perhaps unrelated but what is it with these naming conventions? Hellfire, Bonecrusher, Gravedigger, MurderBox. It's not badass at all, it's ridiculous.