Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The VIPER VPN100 looks fierce and performs with impressive results. Where the VIPER VPN100 particularly excels is its endurance: 800 TBW for this 512GB model is really terrific. This is a TLC NAND product, and that does show in some areas (long sustained writes). In a worst-case scenario, writes drop to 600 MB/s once the buffer runs dry. Luckily, the drive is fitted with one of the biggest heatsinks ever used on a m.2 format device (resulting in a total height of 10.5 mm), so you don’t need to worry about the temperatures even if you don’t have too much airflow about. The aluminium heatsink is well-made, and the six vertical fins help to effectively dissipate the heat that the card generates when you push it hard. In addition to the standard internal heat sensor, Patriot has fitted an external sensor as well, to make sure that the drive performs at its best. You have to keep in mind that you need a motherboard with the PCI Express Gen3 (x4) interface and an NVMe-ready BIOS to take full advantage of the drive’s performance. Up to 3450 MB/s sounds really impressive, and we might see even more soon.

Performance

After you pass roughly 20 gigabytes of continuous writes, the buffer fills up, and the drives starts to write directly to TLC NAND. When that happens, the performance can drop substantially, in this case to 600 MB/s. While we can’t really complain that it’s slow, it doesn’t look impressive all that impressive either, given the maximum bandwidth. This is typical of TLC and QLC SSDs. IOPs are on a good level, and you shouldn’t have any complaints in this department, and also it’s not even that important for regular users. The temperatures were well under control, and 55 degrees is a good result, with no impact on the drive’s performance.

Conclusion

This is a good product, so we’ve decided to give it the “Great Value” award. You can buy this 512GB version for around 100 USD, and you've seen the numbers, it’s well worth it. You also need to remember that the price will most likely drop even further, as that’s what the current market trend dictates. Performance is very, very decent, and the temps are more than fine, so you shouldn’t expect to see any throttling. The TBW values are excellent. Our 512 GB model is rated at 800TB/TBW, which is very good, and you do need to remember that this is something that you can potentially use in a warranty claim. The Viper VPN100 has TLC-written NAND and comes with a 3-year warranty (I’m sure we’d all like to like it to be longer, something like 5 years).  The VIPER VPN100 is one of fastest enthusiast-class NVMe m2 SSDs out there with a fairly mainstream price, it is a really fast, yet affordable solution for any DiY PC gamer.

Recommended  Downloads

• Anvils Storage Utilities
• AS SSD
• CrystalDiskInfo
• CystalDiskMark
• PC Mark Vantage Storage Tests
• SiSoft Sandra Benchmark suite
• ATTO Disk Benchmark

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