Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD Review

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One of the biggest treats for your PC is an SSD, icing on the cake is an M.2 and to top it off and an NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD.  Nothing gets a PC boosting it’s speed like a fast SSD, and maybe some RAM and a CPU as well, but that’s a story for another review.  Capacity, Speed and Reliability are the most important, but what good are those if you can’t afford the SSD?

Today’s review will be of the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe 3.0×2 NVMe 1.2 M.2 SSD.

While it might look like a stick of RAM, it’s not.  Like I will show you a little later in this review, this actually goes connected directly into the PCI-e lane, but not through a PCIe slot, don’t worry I will show you.  Before we get into the speeds and how to connect it, let me walk you through the features and specifications.

  • Capacity: 256GB
  • Model Number: PS256GPM280SSDR
  • Interface: PCIe NVMe Gen3 x 2 Lanes
  • Form Factor: M.2 2280
  • Firmware: E8FK11.5
  • NVMe Standard 1.2
  • Controller: Phison 5008 E8 (PS5008-E8)
  • Flash Memory Type: Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS3 3D TLC
  • Sequential read: up to 1,700 MB/s
  • Sequential Write: up to 780MB/s
  • Random Read IOP’s: up to 200K
  • Random Write IOP’s: up to 90K
  • Meantime to Failure (MTBF): 2 Million hours
  • Endurance Rating 150TBW (Terabytes written)
  • 3 Year limited warranty

Didn’t mean to bore you with those details, but let’s check out the unboxing so you can see what comes inside this package.

The package looks like something you can pick up at any retail store, plain an simple, though I had to use scissors to break the box open.  I like to reuse the packages, I could not here, not a huge deal.

There are no instruction manuals here, or pamphlets, which is good because people mostly throw those away and rarely look at them anyway.

So, when all is said and done with the unboxing, we have this:

Now that we have the drive, let’s take a closer look at it, see what makes it tick in the next section, Patriot Scorch 256GB SSD close up.

Continue: Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe SSD close up

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On the label of the drive, we can see the drive name, Scorch M2, model number PS256GPM280SSDR part number PE000549 and a few of the certifications.  Below that, we can see the capacity of the drive then the form factor and interface M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe Gen3 x 2 Lanes.  There is a large warning there, warranty void if the label is removed, I think we should remove it to see what is under the hood.

At the very head of the drive, where you screw it down to the motherboard, we find these chips.  They are Toshiba 3D TLC Flash IC’s.  There are 4 of these 64GB NAND chips.

 

Below the 4th NAND chip, we find this chip, the PHISON controller.  The PHISON single sided 5008 E8 controller features a PCIe 3 x2 host interface and has 4 NAND channels (the 64GB mentioned above).  This controller provides this M.2 Drive with its SmartECC, Smart Refresh and End to End Datapath Protection.

At the other end, the side that connects to the motherboard, we find the Nanya IC.  Where as the PHISON 5008 controller can support up 512MB of RAM, this drive sports a 128Meg DDR3L SDRAM chip for caching.

On the rear of the drive, we have the capacity and a QR code, which I think might be broken since it takes you to a tactical official site.  The drive is riddled with traces and some silk screening, as it should be but nothing much else of importance here

OK so now we test right?  Of course not, how would we test without the drive in the machine?  In this next section I will not only show you how to install the drive into your machine, but I will also show you how to install Windows 10 on it, then we can get to benchmarking.

Continue: How to install and configure the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe SSD

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Event the most experience PC Guru at some point didn’t know how to install an M.2 SSD or Windows on it for the mater.  In this chapter we go over both so that you can get up and running in no time.

So coming up next, let me show you how to install the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe SSD on to your motherboard, of course if your board contains an M.2 socket.

That was pretty easy right, well now that you have that installed, let me show you how to install Windows 10 onto it.  The motherboard I am using in this example is the EVGA Z390 Dark.

Also pretty simple, but if you have never done it before, it can be very intimidating, I hope I have helped you.

Now, not everyone wants it as a primary drive, some people want it as a secondary drive.  A secondary drive for storing pictures, music, videos and games, don’t worry you can do that too.

To set it up as a secondary drive, you would follow the first video on installing the physical drive.  Once it is installed and you have booted into windows using another drive as your primary drive, then you need to work within Windows 10 to get that working, I will show you that here.

In the examples I have provided below, I am not using this specific drive but the information would be the same other than the drive size.

First, right click on the Start button on the bottom left hand corner and click “Disk Management”.

I have a few drives, but towards the bottom you will see Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2 and Disk 3.  Notice that Disk 0, 1 and 3 all state that have information on them, and also state that they have some partition, to make it easy also they are lined in blue.

The legend on the bottom left hand corner also provides that information.

The 3rd drive, Disk 2 has a black line over it and reads “Unallocated” which means there are no partitions and no data written on it, its blank.  Let’s fix that.

Right click on the “Unallocated” space and you will see a drop down as shown above, click “New Simple Volume”

Once you do, you will start the “New Simple Volume Wizard”, just click “Next” here.

On this second screen, if you want to make multiple partitions, you will want to change the size you are making this partition (size of the drive) but if want to use the entire drive as one partition, just click “Next”

Here you can choose the drive letter you would like this partition to become, then click “Next”

On this screen, you can choose the partitions, Allocation unit size, Volume label, if you would like to quick format it and/or enable file and folder compression.

For Windows, you are mostly going to want to be using NTFS as the file system.  Allocation unit size, it is probably safe to keep the default size unless you want to get down to specifics with the block sizes and tweaking performance to a grain of salt.  Volume Label is the name of the drive, in this example I will name it “GAMES”.

Perform a quick format will take seconds to format the drive to appear as a blank drive so you can fill it up, if you uncheck it, you will be waiting for hours for this drive to get formatted/cleared.

“Enable file and folder compression” is a horrible trade off option.  In essence, you will save space (not sure exactly how much) by having your data compressed all of the time and when the data is needed, it will need to decompressed before it can become fully utilizable.  Because of the speed of today’s CPU’s, the time is little to nothing, you may not notice it but still, I never touch this option.

When you are done reading all of this, you can click “Next”

Once you click “Next” the process begins formatting/clearing your drive getting it ready for use.  This takes only a few seconds but while this is occurring, you can click “Finish”.

When you are done, your “Disk Management” screen will look something like this, with all blue stripes.

Now if you open up “Computer”, you will find your newly formatted drive.  I circled it above, remember I named it “GAMES”.  She’s all yours but now let’s move on to the performance.

I am going to put all the performance all together for all 3 drives, to save you some time reading it instead of the way I used to do it.  With that said, let’s move onto Benchmarking and comparing the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe SSD.

Continue: Benchmarking and comparing the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe SSD

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In this section, we will compare 3 different drives, the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe 3.0×2 NVMe 1.2 M.2 SSD, Samsung EvO 850 500GB SSD and the WD Black 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD.

We will be recording scores from these drives and comparing them and discussing the performance within the results.

Before I get into the performance though, I will provide system specifications so that you can compare.  Please take note, since this newer board, drives that I have tested previously take a second or 2 longer that previously recorded, even though they have a brand-new install of windows and drivers.  This is why you can never compare the same drive on 2 different systems and why I re-benchmark all my drives on newer motherboards.

One of the factors in the results, aside from the performance is the cost.  The Patriot Scorch 256GB is $42.99, Samsung 850 EVO 500gig: $99.95 and the WD Black 512GB $173.49.

One thing I did, to improve performance and level out the playing field is turned off Windows write-cache buffer flushing.  I did this again only for performance, you don’t need to do this and I recommend not doing it as it raises the potential for corrupting the data on your drive if there is a power outage or maybe you have to manually restart the computer.

If you are interested in disabling this, if anything just for testing, right click on the start button in Windows 10, then select “Device Manager”.  In the device manager, click to expand “Disk drivers” then right click on the drive you want to disable this on and click “Properties”.

When you are on the drives Properties, click on the “Policies” tab and place a check in the box reading “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device and click OK.  You may need to restart your computer for this to be fully disabled, than that’s it.

For testing, we will be using 4 pieces of software, ATTO Disk Benchmark, Boot Racer, CrystalDiskMark and HWMonitor.

ATTO Disk Benchmark is used to help measure storage system performance and a great way to start off the comparisons.  These tests performed are measure by transfer sizes and lengths for reads and write speeds.

Above you will see a screenshot of all 3 with ATTO run, you can click on them to zoom in, but the next section will break it down a little easier to read.

I have to say, I am a bit amazed, not that it did well, but that it did so well.

Breaking it down a bit, it was pretty evident that the Samsung 850 EVO was going to come dead in last, but it provides an example on how the SATA port should only be left to storage drives and works real hard to keep up.   It could have come in just a tab bit faster, but not by much, at least still not in the lines of a competition.

The WD Black 512GB is a x4 drive, while the Patriot is a x2 drive, yet we can see here how they are pushing the limits, figuratively.  The Patriot Scorch came in the lead over the WD Black on 64MB write by 10.09% and 64MB Read actually tied up, at least by what I could read on ATTO.  On 48MB Write, the Patriot Scorch once again came in the lead by 6.62% and actually lost to the WD Black by 3.04% on 48MB Read.  On 512KB Write, the Patriot Scorch again takes the lead at 4.81% and again lost to the WD Black on Read by 3.03%.  Finally, on 256KB write, the Scorch takes the lead by 4.08% and the WD Black again leads on read by 3.06%.

So the Patriot is a better reader than a writer, both are important of course but the fact that a x2 drive is taking the lead on anything over a x4 drive is pretty impressive, also because the drive is much more affordable.  We will get into this a little but more in the conclusion.

Next up is CrystalDiskMark.

Crystal disk mark uses Microsoft’s own DiskSpd test to calculate its results.  DiskSpd is a load storage generator and performance test tool from the Windows Server and Cloud Server infrastructure Engineering teams.

Above you will see a screenshot of all 3 with CrystalDiskMark run, you can click on them to zoom in, but the next section will break it down a little easier to read.

We can see here on the Sequential Read of Q32TI (multi Queues & Threads), the WD Black came in at a lead by 17.26% and writes the Patriot Scorch took the lead by 5.50%.  In 4KiB Q8T8 (8 Queus/threaded Reads/Writes), the WD Black took lead over the Scorch by a miniscule 3.96%, and on the write side, the Patriot Scorch took the lead over the WD Black by a more modest 5.07%.

Jumping to the 4K side, things got a little more interesting.   Under 4KiB Q4TI (1 Queue & 1 Thread) we find the Patriot Scorch takes the lead on writes by a tiny 2.56% and the WD Black takes the lead by 8.23%.

While speed may be speed, I wanted to explain what each of these means.

  • 4KIB Q1T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with single queue and thread
  • 4KiB Q8T8 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (8) and threads (8)
  • Seq Q32T1 is Sequential Read or Write of multi queues and threads
  • 4KiB Q32T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (32) and threads (1)

Windows assumes that files and memory are handled in 4 kilobyte chunks, meaning that all transfers from a drive to memory are 4 kilobytes in size.

A queue, is a set of instructions, 1 queue is one set of instructions and multi queue or multiple queues are multiple sets of instructions or data and they are processed in order.  A thread, manages the queues processing their data, a thread handles 1 queue, multiple threads handle multiple queues to process data efficiently.

The one most pay attention to is the Seq Q32T1, as this is the reading that drive manufactures publish and are usually held accountable for.

With that explanation, we can see that the Scorch is not holding its own on the reported speed.  It states that it can reach speeds up to 1,700Gbps, we have seen a max of 1,555 and on ATTO 1,630Gbps.  Not happy that they did not reach their top speeds, but both are still fast.  To be fair, the WD did not keep up with it’s promises either.

Interesting results here, and a little more that both ATTO and CrystalDiskMark don’t 100% match, but this is another reason why it is good to have more than 1 test.

Another important performance indicator is boot speed.  For this we use BootRacer by Greatis Software

Here we can see that from a shut down stat till the second it reaches windows, it took 12 seconds.  It took another 14 seconds for Windows to reach an idle state that nothing was still loading.  In total 26.203 seconds.  Let’s see how all 3 drives performed in this test.

In these tests, we can see that overall, the WD Black drive, booted into windows and was 100% usable 8.78% faster than the Patriot Scorch drive and 1.61% faster than the Samsung EVO.  The Samsung 850 EVO actually booted 7.17% faster than the scorch, so at least SATA is still good for something here?

I have tested with 2 of these drives previous on the Z370 platform on the EVGA Z370 and they did boot a little faster but on the EVGA Z390 Dark board, it did take up to 8 seconds longer.  I tried both under AHCI and RAID configuration (RAID without actually having 2 drives) and they did take the same amount of time.

The EVGA Z390 Dark board brings heat pads to reduce the heat on the M.2 drives, but I did not install them on purpose since not everyone reading this article will have this board, so the tests are more real world.  I tested these drives since drives burning up is a concern for many people since it has been reported previously.

Like processors, once these drives reach their thresholds, they will throttle in speeds to protect themselves but no one wants their drive to slow down.  I tested this running a pass of ATTO and quickly afterwards running a pass of CrystalDiskMark, both of which will heat up the drives nicely.   Also to help them get a little more toasty, each drive was tested on the very first M.2 slot which is directly in the first PCI-e slot which is currently being populated by the EVGA Geforce RTX 2080 XC Ultra Gaming card.

The slot you see here squared out in red is actually the second slot, I had it in the slot just above that but I wanted you to see where the slots were and how the card was.

That is without the card.  So let’s see what the temperatures were.

The temperatures were taken using HWMonitor after each test.  We can see here that the WD Black 512GB came out 4° hotter than the Scorch.  The thermal pads will help, but again I did not want to include those in this review, as will of course better air flow in a case.  Please note, the 66°C and 70°C are max temps, it does not mean the drive was always at this temperature but only that was the max, if even for a second.

So with all this information, I think its time to close up this review and give you my Final Thoughts and Conclusion.

Continue: Final Thoughts and Conclusion

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Initially when I was proposed to review this drive, I was excited because I was getting another SSD to review, I like reviewing them.  Then I found out that it was going to be a 256GB and smaller SSD’s are always slower, I wanted at least a 512GB or a 1TB as to keep up with the WD and not make the Patriot drive look so bad.  They sent me the 256GB instead….

Check out my review overview before we get into the Pros and Cons

With that and all you have read above, let’s see if you agree with my pros and cons.

Pros

  • No drivers required
  • VERY Affordable Drive
  • Very Fast for the price
  • Nice warranty, 3 years
  • Keep relatively cool without heatpads

Cons

  • Does not meet its rated speed specs.
    • Write Speeds are lacking
    • Read Speeds on par
  • Does not include any software to potentially improve performance or a diagnostic suite.

Actually, I was incredibly surprised to find that the 256GB actually held its own pretty well.  The drive does VERY well on writes, but fumbles on the reads, would the 512GB have done better?  The 256GB drive has Sequential Read speeds of up to 1700MB/s and write speeds of up to 780MB/s while the 512GB had read speeds of up to 1700MB and Write Speeds of up to 950MB/s.  This tells me that it would have torn the WD Black 512GB even more on writes, but still leaving a little left to be desired on reads.  I do have to say, performance varies from board to board, but I have to write on what I experienced.

So we have performance, it was not 100%, but it was pretty close to it, but the other aspect is pricing.  The Scorch is only $42.99 while the WD Black 512GB is $173.49.  The price is great, though it is a 256GB compared to a 512GB, but the 512GB version of the scorch is only $78 on Amazon (at the time of this review), so that makes it that much more amazing.  $100 dollars cheaper for a comparable drive.

The Scorch keeps its price so low, because it is using the x2 controller version of the Phison 5008 E8 NVMe 1.2 while the WD Black 512GB drive is using Marvell’s 88SS1093 a x4 controller with NVMe 1.1 Support.  X4 supports speeds up to 32Gbps while x2 supports speeds up to 16Gbps.  To keep costs down and make it more attractive, they had to make some sacrifices.

With its cost, speed and warranty, the only issue is that it does not keep up with the performance it promised but for the price, I don’t think it’s a bad option.  It keeps cooler than the other drives I have tested but does not included additional software, though not many people would use it anyway.  This is not marketed as a performance drive, but it does have decent performance.

Great job Patriot, while this may not be a performance drive you still get some pep out of it but you do definitely have a huge value on here, even for the 512GB drive.  With all this, I award the Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD an 8.9 out of 10.

What do you guys think, please let me know in the comments below or in the videos, I would love to know.

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We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.