Review on Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD - Fast & Reliable Storage Solution by Ray Welchhance

This M.2 drive is relatively inexpensive and delivers remarkable speed. Crystal Disk Mark 6 tests showed read speeds hit a consistent 34XX MB/s, putting the drive on par with drives costing twice as much. The writing speed frustrated me a bit. The spec says write speeds can reach up to 3000MB/s, but all I've seen is 629MB/s, which is terribly slow. I cloned my original drive using Acronis True Image, a technique I've used dozens of times, so I could just remove the original drive and attach the new drive. Long story short, I had to use powershell and manually run the TRIM command on the drive to get it working properly. When the TRIM command was complete, I magically saw write speeds in the 2200MB/s range. The NewEgg site lists the published write speeds for the drive, so I'm happy with its performance. The drive has what I think is a large attractive heatsink that maintains temperatures between 35°C and 45°C for normal tasks and large file copying. I didn't experience any throttling like other M.2 drives without a heatsink. At first glance, I was concerned that the heatsink might be so tall that it would interfere with GPU installation, but the concern was unnecessary as there was enough room for a perfect drive installation. Now if you have a motherboard with integrated heatsinks over the M.2 slots, you will need to remove the motherboard heatsink to install the drive. You may or may not like the look of a drive attached to your motherboard without the sleek look of a motherboard heatsink, but that's entirely up to the motherboard. At first I was hesitant to buy a Viper disc because I didn't think it was one. brand and I wasn't sure how reliable it would be. I bought two of these drives (512GB and 1TB) and as far as I can tell they are comparable to drives that cost twice as much. I will definitely consider the Patriot Viper rim line for future purchases. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance drive, this drive might be for you. I almost mentioned that I bought the drive one day and it was delivered the next day (I'm one of the main contributors). I don't know how Revain does it but I'm very happy with the speed of their delivery.