Patriot Viper VPN100 PCIe M.2 SSD Review

Test Setup & Results

All of these tests were performed before I removed the heatsink. Additional testing was done after the heatsink was removed. The first round of benchmarks was run with an empty drive. The second round of benchmarks was run with the drive over 75% full. Each benchmark was run three times and we recorded the best overall scores for this review. There were no less than 20 minutes between each benchmark to give the drive time to cool down and rest. A quick side note. The threaded Q-depth tests on the Anvils Storage Utilities named the drive as a Toshiba drive, However, it had the correct letter and capacity.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance.  However, its more than capable of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of files and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second

Both the fresh out of the box and the 75% capacity tests are almost identical with the 75% test just barely ahead. The ATTO tests were able to get extremely close to the manufactures advertised speeds.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD Benchmark is a simple and portable utility which helps you measure the effectiveness and performance of any solid state (SSD) drives connected to your system. It will test “Seq”, “4K”, “4K-64Thrd” and Access Time. In the end, it will give your SSD a score. 4K tests the read/write abilities by access random 4K blocks while the Sequential test measures how fast the drive can read a 1GB file. For AS SSD, we run the SSD benchmark and the Copy Benchmark.

Empty Drive:

75% Capacity

The AS SSD tests came back with 2247.75 MB/s read and 1984.01 MB/s write on the empty drive for the sequential tests. 4K results were 45.63 MB/s read and 117.71 on the write and earned an overall score of 5302. The tests with the drive at 75% resulted in 2250.58 MB/s read and 1982.07 MB/s write in the sequential tests. 4K resulted in 55.40 MB/s read and 146.20 MB/s write speeds with an overall score of 5302. Each of the tests fell a bit short of the manufactures stated sequential read and write speeds.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a powerful performance measurement tool for both traditional hard drives and SSDs. The tool can monitor, and test read and write speeds on hard drives while also providing information from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) that provides basic information about the disk and its parameters, including partitions and volumes.

The ANVIL SSD benchmark resulted in sequential read speed of 3281.40 MB/s read speed and 1984.50MB/s write speeds on the fresh drive with an overall score of 15698.26. The VPN100 at 75% capacity yielded a result of 2301.12 MB/s read and 1984.50 MB/s write speeds and for the first time in our testing scored lower at 14835.12 overall.

CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1

CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

Crystal Disk Mark is where we see the closest sequential read and write speeds to what the manufacture published. The empty drive resulted in 3469.9 MB/s read and 2101.1 MB/s write speeds. When the drive was filled up to 75% of its total capacity, the read speed came back at 3472.0 MB/s and 2105.3 MB/s on the write speed. 4K speeds were good as well at 966.7 MB/s read and 1952.7 MB/s write on the empty drive compared to 1065.3 MB/s read and 1939.8 MB/write speed when the drive is filled to 75%.