With AMD's new 3rd-Gen Ryzen Platform supporting PCIe 4.0, a number of storage manufacturers have announced SSDs that take advantage of the increased bandwidth. Earlier in the week, both Gigabyte and Corsair took the wraps off of their high-speed drives, and today Patriot Memory revealed that it is also working on an M.2 SSD based on the same Phison E16 controller.
Unlike Corsair, which has targeted July 2019 as a release date for its MP600 SSD, Patriot says its as-yet-unnamed drive probably won't arrive until late 2019 or even early 2020. The product is still very-much in development as Patriot works on both the heatsink and the firmware that will make its product stand out from competitors that use the same controller.
Patriot said that it is targeting sequential read speeds of up to 4.8 GB/s and writes of 4 GB/s. Those numbers aren't final so it's quite possible that the final product will match the 4.95 GB/s write and 4.2 GB/s read that Corsair is claiming for its drive.
Patriot also expects its drive to provide 4K random reads at up to 750,000 IOPS and writes at up to 700,000 IOPS. Phison has said that its controller can hit up to 900,000 IOPS, meaning it's possible Patriot's final product will have even higher rates.
The SSD will come in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and will have up to 2GB of DDR cache. It's a standard M.2 2280 form factor, and Patriot confirmed that it is using Toshiba TLC NAND. Though executives didn't say which Toshiba NAND, it's clearly BiCS4, the only type of flash memory that the Phison E16 controller supports.
There's no word on pricing, and because of sinking NAND prices and rising tariffs, it's hard for anyone to predict the MSRP this many months in advance of launch.
