Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB NVMe SSD Review
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Conclusion
It turns out the Patriot Hellfire M.2 is not the product we originally thought it was. After some tuning, the application performance is up and this drive is ready to take on the emerging mainstream NVMe market.
It's difficult to explain how far NVMe has come over the last year. We are in the middle of a crossover from SATA to NVMe for the upgrade market, and some firms even predict NVMe will out-ship SATA in 2017. Premium NVMe products led the way, and now SSD manufacturers want to use a three-tier approach, just as they did with SATA over the last six years.
Intel has the entry-level NVMe market wrapped up with the low-cost 600p, but the mainstream market has more contenders. OCZ dropped the price of the RD400, and it now competes directly with the Hellfire M.2. The upcoming 960 EVO fits into the picture as well. It would be difficult for planar TLC to play in the NVMe arena. Some companies will make 600p clones, but products like the Adata SX8000 with IMFT 3D MLC will flood the mainstream market with low-cost SMI SM2260 controllers. The Patriot Hellfire M.2 is one of the few value SSDs available now, but it will be one of many very soon.
If you are looking for a better value, we suggest waiting a month for manufacturers to release more products. The intense competition will help to lower prices, which spurs sales.
We like the Patriot Hellfire M.2, but it's still not the well-rounded product we recommend that you buy. We really can't recommend a guaranteed winner yet. Both the Hellfire and OCZ RD400 deliver an exciting performance boost over SATA, but both also have weaknesses that we don't expect to find with Samsung's new NVMe line.
We've found that what you do with your SSD this year may not be what you do with it after an upgrade. We would like to see Phison correct the power consumption issues at some point. Your shiny new SSD today may become your hand-me-down notebook boot drive after the next upgrade. Pair this drive with a tired, year-old battery and your notebook may only have enough power to respond to an email or two before shutting down.
The lack of a proper E7 NVMe driver to take advantage of custom NVMe commands still has us perplexed. Even if Phison says the drive doesn't need it, and other manufacturers only get a 10% performance increase from a custom driver, it feels a little lacking to not put forth the effort. Like many Phison-based products, the underlying substance is there, but the finishing touches are missing.
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If you are a gamer and just need a high-performance NVMe SSD to load your levels a little faster, the Patriot Hellfire fits the bill. Over time, you may get more firmware updates that increase performance further, but that isn't guaranteed. The drive is cheaper than the 950 Pro and Intel SSD 750 Series right now, but other competitive options are coming in the next 30 days.
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Chris Ramseyer was a senior contributing editor for Tom's Hardware. He tested and reviewed consumer storage.
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Game256 "The Hellfire M.2 is currently the only NVMe SSD to target the middle, but that will change next month when Samsung ships the 960 EVO to resellers"Reply
The release date of Samsung 960 EVO/PRO is October. Or you know "something"? -
Game256 Another meaningless and overpriced drive. The only thing that may help all these vendors to compete with Samsung is the price but usually they constantly overstate it, making it too close to Samsung 950 Pro. Samsung is going to kill them all with 960 EVO.Reply -
Game256 Btw some Polish and German tech sites already received samples of Samsung 960 Pro so it's interesting that you didn't received them yet.Reply
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Brian_R170 "The Patriot Hellfire M.2 and Intel 600p are the first products to really burst the NVMe pricing bubble." Are you speculating on future pricing? The statement is hardly true based on actual retail or suggested retail pricing. I checked the retail pricing of currently-available M.2 NVMe SSDs and all but 2 cluster together with pricing differences of less than 10%. The outliers are the Intel 600p and the Plextor M8Pe.Reply -
shrapnel_indie I guess bursting the bubble depends on the source of your part: At the beginning of the article, the viewed pricing on my end was more in competition to Samsung's M.2 PCIe offerings a few months ago. At the end of the article, it was more in-line for the mid-range to high-range SATA drives of comparable size.Reply -
JustAnITGuy PLEASE ALWAYS include a standard 7200RPM 3.5" drive and a 7200RPM 2.5" drive with ANY SSD benchmarks. The vast majority of people still have these old drives, and if this is to educate people to purchase products, It would be nice to see a side-by-side comparison and not have to go to separate benchmark articles or websites.Reply -
CRamseyer The results are so much different we can't really put them in the same chart together. Maybe in the future we will publish an article with a mainstream HDD, SSD and NVMe SSD for a comparison.Reply -
steve4king "It turns out the Patriot Hellfire M.2 is not the product we originally thought it was. After some tuning, the application performance is up and this drive is ready to take on the emerging mainstream NVMe market."Reply
What do you mean? The product you originally thought it was was based on the original firmware.. right? The 2.1 firmware is about the same, or noticeably worse than the 2.0 firmware in every bench.. -
steve4king Under sequential read performance, I think you have a typo:Reply
"The 240GB outperforms the Samsung PM961, and Intel's 600p nips at the heels of the premium Samsung 950 Pro 256GB."
I think you meant to say:
The 240GB outperforms the Samsung PM961 and Intel's 600p, and nips at the heels of the premium Samsung 950 Pro 256GB.