Patriot has announced a new high-speed SSD line, the Viper VP4300, which, like other recent PCIe 4.0 additions to the market, dangles read/write speeds in the neighborhood of 7GB/s in front of gamers and power users. It is offered in 1TB and 2TB capacities, the latter of which can write data faster than the controller chip's hardware seems designed to handle.

This is not another SSD series built around Phison's popular and superior E18 controller chip. Instead, Patriot has chosen Innogrit's flagship Rainier IG5236 controller, which supports eight NAND channels and capacities up to 8TB; according to Innogrit, the IG5236 delivers up to 7,400MB/s in sequential read performance, sequential write performance of up to 6.4GB/s.

Patriot claims that the 2TB Viper VP4300 achieved these maximum read speeds in two popular storage benchmark utilities, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark, but in both tests the sequential write speed reached 6,800MB /per second in both tests. This is not a small difference of 400 MB/second against the write performance Innogrit claims its controllers can handle.

While this may seem small at first glance, it is impressive that Patriot would extract 400MB/sec of additional performance if it actually did so (we have not tested the Viper VP4300 to see how its actual performance compares to its advertised speeds (We have not). To put this in perspective, the fastest SATA SSDs typically top out at about 550-580 MB/s.

This is likely due to continuous improvements in firmware; our friends at Anandtech featured the IG5236 controller at last year's CES, which at the time was rated up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,100 MB/s for sequential read and write performance, respectively and were evaluated as "the best of the best.

In any case, this is another very fast PCIe 4.0 SSD. Here is how it compares to the competition:

In terms of sequential writes, the 1TB Viper VP4300's rated speed of 5,500 MB/sec is not as fast as the 2TB drive. However, the rated read speeds are the same for the two capacities.

Patriot also includes a DRAM cache in these SSDs, which helps both speed up certain operations (another possible reason for the very fast write speed of the 2TB model) and improve endurance. Regarding the latter, Patriot rates the endurance of the 1TB model at 1,000 TBW (terabytes written) and the 2TB model at 2,000 TBW. Both drives also come with a 5-year warranty.

The drives come with two low-profile heat sinks, one made of aluminum and one made of graphene. For best results, Patriot recommends installing both, with the graphene heatsink on the bottom and the aluminum heatsink on top, if space is available (PDF).

Both drives are available now, priced at $440 for the 2TB model and $230 for the 1TB model. They are $30 more expensive than the PNY XLR8 CS3140 without a heatsink and $15 more expensive than the version with a chunky heatsink.