Patriot Viper VPN100 256GB Storage with PCIe M.2 2280 High Performance Internal Solid State Drive

This M.2 drive is relatively inexpensive and delivers remarkable speeds. Testing with Crystal Disk Mark 6 the read speed is hitting a consistent 34XX MB/s which places the drive right up there with drives costing twice as much. The write speed now caused me some grief initially. The specification says that the write speed can be up to 3000 MB/sec but all I was seeing was 629 MB/s which is terribly slow. I cloned my original drive using Acronis True Image, a procedure that I have used dozens of times, so that I could simply remove the original drive and plug in the new drive. To make a long story short I ended up having to use the powershell and executing a manual TRIM command on the drive to make it work correctly. When the TRIM command finished I was magically seeing write speeds in the 2200 MB/sec range. On the NewEgg site that is the published write speed for the drive so I am happy with the drive performance.The drive has what I consider to be, a large attractive heat sink that keeps the thermals in the 35C to 45C doing normal tasks and large file copy operations. I have not seen any throttling like I have seen with other M.2 drives without any heatsink. At first glance I was concerned that the heatsink might be so tall that it would interfere with the GPU installation, but the concern was unnecessary because there was enough clearance for the drive to fit perfectly. Now if you have a motherboard that has built in heatsinks over the M.2 sockets then you would have to remove the motherboard heatsink to install the drive. You may or may not like the appearance of the drive plugged into your motherboard without the sleek appearance of the motherboard heatsink, but it would totally depend on the motherboard.Initially I was hesitant to purchase the Viper drive because I considered it to be an off brand and I was not sure how reliable it would be. I have purchased two of these drives (a 512GB and a 1TB drive) and as far as I can tell they are comparable with drives costing twice as much. I will certainly consider the Patriot Viper line of drives on future purchases. If you are looking for a decently priced drive with high-end performance then this may be the drive for you.I almost failed to mention that I purchased the drive one day and it was delivered the next (I am a prime member). I do not know how Amazon does it, but I am very pleased with the speed of their deliveries.

Cooling for M.2 SSD's is essential.dont be a fool and bottleneck you system.just make sure you have proper airflow in your case, my SSD's temps are idle 35C and 38C max under loadedit 17/02/2022:The drive suddenly *died* or that's what i thought, i have a Linux dual boot system and the drive completely disappeared from my UEFI BIOS that usually means the drive is dead and not found by the hardware.So i removed the drive and seated it back onto the motherboard, it was again found in the BIOS and till i booted halfway into Windows the drive disappeared again...After i few tries with all same results i booted into Linux, no problem, scanned the drive for its health and all OK.I found out that Microsoft pushed an update to forcibly crash your system or drive by unmounting itself from the system at UEFI BIOS level.Im a software programmer/engineer so upon some digging i found that Microsoft had pushed a custom secure boot certificate in the UEFI BIOS which prevented the drive from being recognised.Nonetheless after deleting the custom certificate and booting halfway into Windows 10 the certificate was pushed back into the UEFI BIOS and the drive disconnected itself from the system.I removed the certificate, password protected access to UEFI and reinstalled Windows 10 to fix, ran the Viper tool to check the health and all OK.Microsoft is using dirty tactics to push people installing Windows 11, if your drive suddenly goes missing it is most likely this problem.My Viper SSD is still alive and kicking with super performance !

The drive is awesome and fast. Replaced an older m.2 drive with this and I am loving the speed increase. The heatsink is a little big and almost hits my video card. I was able to use Clonezilla to copy my old drive to the new drive. If you need to copy your exsiting OS drive to this new M.2 drive I suggest Clonezilla because it's free, been around for a long time, somewhat easy to use, and works with M.2 drives. There are easy to use guides on how to do it.