Final Thoughts
The Patriot Hellfire is the company’s first PCI-Express M.2 drive and they’ve made a good choice going with the Phison E7 controller as many other manufactures have. This controller offers better performance than the Silicon Motion SM2260 that was on the ADATA SX8000 and does not have the heat issues either.
When it comes to performance this drive achieved 2975 MB/s read and 2401 MB/s write in ATTO Disk Benchmark, making it one of the fastest drives we’ve tested to date! This speed is about 4 times the speed of a SATA 6GB/s solid state drive. The results were mixed between our different benchmarks though, so that is something you are going to want to keep in mind. One thing that we definitely want to mention is that write performance definitely will take a hit when dealing with uncompressed data. This was evident in our CrystalDiskMark and Anvil Storage Utilities tests.
The M.2 form factor is great and I can see it becoming the new standard in due time. Being able to plug these drives right into your motherboard means that there is no extra space, or cables cluttering up your system. PCI-Express 3.0 x4 slots have been standard on Intel motherboards since Z170 and all the new AM4 motherboard from AMD have at least one of these slots as well.
Patriot does offer a 3-year warranty with this drive. Which is good, but many of the Phison E7-based drives available do offer 5-year warranties. Right now the 480 GB version of this drive which we reviewed today sells for $239.99 at our favorite online retailer, so this is definitely an affordable drive. Overall ThinkComputers gives this drive a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Great overall performance
– M.2 2280 form factor
– No over-heating or throttling issues
– Price
– 3-year warranty
Cons:
– Write performance takes a hit when dealing with incompressible data
