Patriot Memory P300 M.2 P300P1TBM28 1 TB

The wind of change

Patriot P300 is a bright representative of the new wave of low-cost SSDs. It is made in the newfangled M.2 NVMe format, and with full-fledged four PCI-E 3.0 lanes, and not narrowed x2, like last year's models. But at the same time, it costs only a little more than the simplest 2.5 "SATA SSD. But the hardware, as is often the case with low-cost SSDs, may differ. from 256 GB to 1 TB), built on the basis of a bundle of the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller and 64-layer 3D TLC flash memory manufactured by IMFT (a joint venture between Intel and Micron).

Main version

The SM2263XT controller has two ARM Cortex-R5 cores and works with flash memory in quad-channel mode. But SSD does not have its own RAM buffer, but it does it more cunningly — it uses part of the RAM of a PC or laptop as a cache (Host Memory Buffer technology). 64 + 64-bit DDR4, while soldered or integrated into other low-cost SSDs — slow 16-bit DDR3. It is thanks to HBM technology that the Patriot P300 demonstrates an enviable, as for its class, IOPS indicator — up to 290K.

Golden mean

Linear read and write speeds are average: 2100 and 1650 MB / s, respectively. Moreover, in the case of recording very large files, the speed is reduced to 300 MB / s. This outperforms 2.5-inch SATA SSDs anyway, but still falls short of flagship PCI-E 3.0 SSDs like the Patriot Viper VPN100 at 3450/3000 Mbps.

Alternative version

The second modification of the Patriot P300 (blue printed circuit board, from 128 GB to 2 TB), which has already been seen in foreign online stores, and will probably soon be on the market with us, is based on a combination of the Phison E13T controller and flash memory 3D QLC by Kioxia (the new name for Toshiba's semiconductor division). This dual-core quad-channel controller is also a direct competitor to the aforementioned SM2263XT, but has a small integrated RAM cache.

Both are good

But the Toshiba / Kioxia 3D QLC flash memory of the “blue” version of the Patriot P300, although theoretically it has a third less guaranteed rewriting resource (320 TB for a terabyte model), but in fact, thanks to a denser layout (96 layers of memory cells), it works just as fast as TLC. As a result, it turns out that there is not much difference which of the modifications of the Patriot P300 (black or blue) to take — both are equally fast.