The Patriot Hellfire M.2 480GB Review: Phison NVMe Tested

The Patriot Hellfire M.2 PCIe SSD is Patriot’s first NVMe SSD, and one of several similar products based on Phison’s E7 NVMe controller. As usual for Phison, the same drive is manufactured for many of their partners, who typically customize only the branding. Phison designs the controller, firmware, and PCB, but leaves the marketing up to their partners.

Phison’s PS5007-E7 controller is their first NVMe SSD controller, supporting a PCIe 3.0 x4 host interface and 8 channels for NAND access. The details we have on the E7 are a bit slim – some collection of ARM cores under the hood is a safe bet, but that’s it – however we do know that the E7 controller is manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm process and uses FCBGA packaging. Interestingly, it doesn’t use the kind of large heatspreader we’ve seen on competing controllers like Silicon Motion’s SM2260. Phison had the E7 platform hardware ready over a year ago, but retail releases were held back by the poor performance of early firmware. Patriot first began shipping the Hellfire last fall, but even after that much delay, they ended up issuing a firmware update shortly after launch.

Phison’s controllers are almost always paired with Toshiba’s NAND flash, and the Patriot Hellfire uses Toshiba’s 15nm MLC. Our review sample is the 480 GB version, the most common capacity for E7 SSD. Patriot also sells a 240 GB version, and some of their competitors offer the 120GB version as well.

The Phison E7 controller was originally intended to be a high-end NVMe controller for client or enterprise use. By the time it was ready for the market, Samsung had raised the bar far too high for the E7 to still be considered high-end. But Phison E7-based SSDs like the Patriot Hellfire have been able to offer very attractive pricing and are usually the cheapest MLC-based NVMe SSDs available. Without the pitfalls of TLC-based SSDs like the Intel SSD 600p and the Samsung 960 EVO, the Patriot Hellfire and its relatives have been attractive entry-level PCIe SSD options.

Aside from other Phison E7 SSDs, the closest competition for the Patriot Hellfire is the Plextor M8Pe, based on the same Toshiba 15nm MLC NAND but using the Marvell 88SS1093 controller with Plextor’s own firmware. The Patriot Hellfire also has to justify its higher price relative to the Intel SSD 600p, the most affordable NVMe SSD, and against high-performing SATA SSDs like Samsung’s 850 EVO and 850 PRO.

• Thanks to Intel for the Core i7-4770K CPU
• Thanks to ASUS for the Z97 Deluxe motherboard
• Thanks to Corsair for the Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1866 DRAM kit, RM750 power supply, Carbide 200R case, and Hydro H60 CPU cooler

Our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.

In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.

To maximally stress the drive’s controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.

The Patriot Hellfire maintains a higher average random write speed than the significantly more expensive OCZ RD400 and the older Samsung 950 PRO, but the Plextor M8Pe performs even better, especially when heatsinks are used.

The Patriot Hellfire does not have the very high consistency of the Intel SSD 750 or most of Samsung’s SSDs, but the score is not worryingly low. For consumer-oriented products, consistency under sustained write load is generally a lower priority than high burst performance and quick recovery during idle times.

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25% Over-Provisioning

The Patriot Hellfire shows some long-term fluctuations in random write performance, especially when equipped with a heatsink to allow for higher peak performance. With extra overprovisioning, the long-term trend is very stable and the effect of the heatsink is greatly reduced.

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25% Over-Provisioning

On shorter time scales, the Patriot Hellfire is never particularly consistent. Adding a heatsink increases the peak performance but only helps the minimums slightly. Adding extra overprovisioning greatly increases the amount of time spent operating at or near peak performance, but does not entirely eliminate the drops down below 5k IOPS.

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn’t take all week to run the test.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive’s average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Patriot Hellfire’s average data rate on The Destroyer is slightly better than the fastest SATA SSD, but it is clearly the slowest MLC NVMe SSD in this bunch, and half the speed of Samsung’s best.

The Patriot Hellfire squanders some of the latency advantages of NVMe, with an average service time that is sitting in the middle of the gap between SATA SSDs and other MLC NVMe SSDs.

The Patriot Hellfire ties with the aging Intel SSD 750 for the number of latency outliers beyond 100ms, but at the 10ms level it is only barely ahead of the best SATA drive and has almost three times as many outliers as the next slowest NVMe SSD.

As with most NVMe SSDs, the Patriot Hellfire burns substantially more energy over the course of The Destroyer than any good SATA SSD. Samsung remains the only company to deliver a PCIe SSD that is on par with SATA SSDs for this power usage metric.

Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren’t enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user’s day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive’s peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.

The Patriot Hellfire exhibits an unusually large disparity in performance when the Heavy test is run on a full drive compared to an empty drive. Fresh out of the box, the Hellfire largely keeps pace with the other MLC NVMe SSDs, but when full its average data rate drops down into the high end of SATA performance territory.

The average service times tell the same story as the average data rates: when the Patriot Hellfire is not filled, it can be lumped in with most of the other NVMe SSDs, but when it is completely full it loses almost all of its advantage over high-end SATA SSDs.

The Patriot Hellfire experiences relatively few high-latency outliers when the Heavy test is run on a fresh drive, but when filled is experiences substantially more outliers and it ranks worse than any MLC SSD in this comparison—NVMe or SATA.

The Patriot Hellfire is not the most power-hungry NVMe SSD in this bunch, but it is still substantially less efficient than Samsung’s SSDs and mainstream SATA SSDs.

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it’s by far the shortest test overall. It’s based largely on applications that aren’t highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.

Filled or not, the Patriot Hellfire manages to keep pace with the Intel SSD 750 and provide a higher average data…