Patriot Scorch 512GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD Review

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NVMe SSDs are no longer reserved for the high-end market as they once were. We’ve seen more entries into the budget-end recently and today I’m taking a closer look at such a solution. On the test-bench is the Patriot Scorch NVMe SSD with a capacity of 512GB (product link).

The Scorch is an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen.3 x 2 NVMe 1.2 drive. With just 2 PCIe lanes, it’s slower than a lot of other drives, but it’s still faster than its SATA brothers.

Patriot chose some well-known components for their drive. There is the Phison E8 (PS5008-E8) controller which is coupled with Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash. There’s also a 512MB DRAM cache on the 512GB version of the drive to aid in the performance.

In other words, the drive is made up of four Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS chips, one Nanya DDR3L cache chip, and the Phison E8 controller. The whole thing is a single sided design which makes it compatible with any system that can accommodate a 2280-sized PCIe drive.

As I started out by mentioning, the Scorch is a PCIe 3.0 x2 drive. That means that it won’t reach the performance figures of the high-end x4 drives. Still, with a sequential performance of up to 1700MB/s when reading and 950MB/s when writing isn’t bad at all. The random performance is rated at 200,000 and 115,000 IOPS when reading and writing.

So, while you don’t get top-of-the-line performance, you get more than any SATA-based drive can offer. And you get it without paying the premium costs of a premium drive.

The endurance is just as important as the performance, if not more. Patriot rates the Scorch series for 75 TBW (Terabytes Written) for every 128GB capacity. Thereby, the 512GB model I have in the office today comes in with a 300TB TBW rating.

The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is a standard 2 million hours while Patriot backs the drive with a 3-year warranty.

With End-to-End datapath protection, Smart Refresh, and SmartECC, the Scorch offers the features you’ll want. Static and advanced wear-levelling, advanced garbage collection, TRIM support, bad block management, and S.M.A.R.T technologies are built-in.

“The Patriot Scorch M.2 Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) SSD is the perfect solution for consumers and professionals looking to get blazingly fast startup times and instantaneous access to their data for better productivity and reliability from their SSD.”

“To ensure the Patriot Scorch M.2 SSD provides rock-solid performance, static and advanced wear-levelling, advanced garbage collection, TRIM support, bad block management and S.M.A.R.T technologies are built in.”

The Scorch SSD comes in a hang-card packaging, much like you’re used to from flash drives and memory cards. You can see the included drive and all the vital features are printed on the front.

The rear side has more details and fine-print for those interested.

Inside the hand-card is a plastic box with the drive.