Patriot is launching into PCI-E based storage with its new Hellfire line of solid state drives. While Patriot is more commonly known for its flash memory (USB drives and SD cards) and RAM DIMMs, it is not new to SSDs. This will be its first line of PCI-E=based SSDs, however. Two drives in the Hellfire series are currently planned for a release later this year and will come in M.2 NVME and PCI-E add-in-card (AIC) versions.
The company is not talking specifics yet, and we will not know full speeds and feeds or pricing for a few months. They did reveal a few scraps of information with the press release though. Both versions of the Hellfire drives (M.2 and AIC) will be powered by a Phison 5007 controller and will use MLC NAND flash. Further, the drives will come in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities. The drives do differ greatly in performance with the Add-In-Card version having significantly better write and slightly improved read performance. Specifically, the M.2 NVME drive is rated at 2,500 MB/s reads and a mere 600 MB/s writes while the AIC version can hit 3,000 MB/s reads and 2,200 MB/s writes.
Patriot expects the Hellfire SSDs to be available by the end of Q1 2016. I welcome the increased PCI-E SSD competition which should help drive prices down further. Hopefully Patriot will release more details soon!
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