Here we are at it with another storage product operating on a PCIe 4.0 bus, but this time coming from Patriot Memory and their Viper Gaming brand. The drive incorporates a Phison E16 controller, DDR4 for storing the mapping tables but also KIOXIA 96L TLC NAND packages. By using TLC storage, the endurance is much higher than QLC, at about 1800 TBW for the 1TB drive which we are going to look upon here.
The product is shipped inside a similar packaging style as we have seen with other Viper M.2 SSDs in the past, which means a red/black color scheme, a photo of the SSD on the top cover but also the rated speeds:
On the back side of the box we will find some specifications in multiple languages, but also the addresses for the Patriot Memory offices:
The top cover opens like a book cover, in order to reveal the drive through a small plastic window, but also a small product description:
For additional protection during transit, the drive is also held inside a transparent plastic custom mold:
The drive comes with a pre-installed black heatsink which does help with heat evacuation in case it gets assisted by the airflow inside the computer case. Before purchasing the drive do some research and make sure that your motherboard does feature removable M.2 heatsinks!
The back side of the PCB does come with a large sticker, mentioning the drive internal code name, total storage capacity; the serial number is placed on a separate, smaller sticker:
The larger sticker is easily removable and only covers a NAND package and a DRAM cache IC:
The DRAM chip features the H5AN4G8NBJR code name and was manufactured by SK Hynix; its total storage capacity being 512MB; the second one is found under the heatsink, while the main controller is a Phison PS5016-E16, the first Gen 4x4 consumer client controller featuring 4th gen LDPC engine, End-to-End Data path protection and also SmartECC. It uses a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 processor, 8 channels and was built on a 28nm process:
One of the KIOXIA BICS4 96-Layer 3D TLC packages features the TABBG65AWV code name and has a total capacity of 256GB. There are four of these on the drive, two on the front and two on the back:
Between the top heatsink and the frontal side of the PCB we will find a large thermal pad as the interface:
