We have recently got the chance to try out the 2TB version of the Viper VPN100 PCIe M.2 SSD from Patriot Gaming as well! This series is known to deliver quite a bit of performance by running on the PCIe 3.0 bus, having rated speeds of up to 3450MB/s for reads and up to 3000MB/s for writes and also includes a hefty heatsink in order to avoid throttling during high usage periods.
The product is shipped inside a compact cardboard enclosure, which opens up like a book and the top cover is held secure by magnetic force:
Some of the product highlights are available on the back, in multiple languages; here we will also read of the Patriot Memory office locations and the manufacturer has already made available some online resources on the well-known platforms:
After opening the cover, we will note the VPN100 product description but also a small window through which we can see how the drive does really look like:
The drive is held secure inside a transparent plastic mold:
VPN100 is renowned for its large aluminum heatsink with fins, which gives the drive a total height of 105mm; this particular feature has one advance and one disadvantage: proper heat dissipation but cannot be installed on motherboards with integrated/non-removable M.2 heatsinks or in laptops:
Under the heatsink we will notice two NAND ICs (512GB each) which are Toshiba 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND, 1GB of DDR buffer but also the Phison PS5012-E12 controller:
The back side is covered by a large sticker highlighting the product internal code name, the total storage space but also a smaller sticker which holds an additional SN; this area comes with the rest of the two Toshiba 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND packages, and also another 1GB of DDR buffer: