Patriot Viper VP4300 PCIe 4.0 SSD Quick Look: Easy PS5 Upgrade

A PS5 Fills Up Quickly. Patriot Has a Solution to the Problem.

If you happen to be among the tens of people who bought one of Sony’s PlayStation 5 consoles at a regular retail store, for MSRP, and actually kept it rather than selling it off for some easy money, then you might have noticed that its internal SSD fills up pretty fast.

After accounting for the difference between MiB and formatted MB, along with the space needed for the OS and system files, the PlayStation 5’s 825GB internal SSD drops to less than 700GB (mine shows 667.2 GB) of available storage for installed games.

And if you’re anything like me, you probably use your PS5 as much for PS4 games as anything, and indeed my console is nothing more than a glorified PS4 Pro outside of the rare PS5 game I find worthwhile (I’ve purchased only two in the past year).

Here’s my dilemma: I wanted to install a bunch of my PS4 games, and still have room left for the odd PS5 title. It’s never going to happen with 667.2 GB of available storage with the number of PS4 titles I have in my library. My solution to this point has been to uninstall one game to make room for the next. Hardly ideal!

Before the upgrade I had a whopping 60 GB of free space – after deleting stuff! Also, what exactly is the 99 GB of “other”?

And sure, you can add storage via USB, but the system’s M.2 slot is easy to access and supports PCIe Gen4 SSDs. Anyway, long story short the folks at Patriot offered to send over one of their fastest drives, which also boasts PS5 compatibility, and I said YES, PLEASE.

Pricing is always a factor when weighing the pros and cons of any product, and here I’m happy to report that the cost of one of these Viper VP4300 SSDs is becoming very attractive. The 1TB model (VP4300-1TBM28H, as reviewed), shows a list price of $215.99 on the company’s website, currently sells for $169.99 on Newegg, but more impressively is just $139.99 on Amazon as I write this.

The Viper VP4300 SSD

The Patriot Viper VP4300 is a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD that includes two heatshield options in the box, and, as mentioned extensively above, Patriot advertises compatibility with Sony’s PlayStation 5 console.

The VP4300 is powered by an InnoGrit Rainier IG5236 controller, and offers advertised speeds of up to 7400 MB/s sequential reads and 6800 MB/s sequential writes. I think, anyway. That write speed (which is printed on the box) seems to be contradicted in places, with InnoGrit listing the IG5236 controller’s limit at 6400 MB/s on writes (perhaps Patriot’s DDR4 DRAM implementation affects this), and the Amazon listing currently stating “up to 5,500MB/s Write” (which is obviously erroneous).

After peeling off its protective backing I stuck the aluminum (or aluminium, if you prefer) heatsink on the VP4300. Here is a photograph to prove it:

PlayStation 5 Installation

And now for the moment I’ve been waiting for: more than doubling the available storage in my PS5. Getting into the system is very easy, after you actually find out how those white plastic panels come off without breaking the tabs. I watched this short video (YouTube link) to find out how, and I was in.

The PS5’s mounting post/screw is installed on the 110 mm position from the factory, for some reason, but it’s just a matter of un-screwing it and moving down to the more sane 80 mm position. After accomplishing this menial (but not degrading) task, the VP4300 was installed:

With the SSD installed it was a very, very simple process to actually begin using it. I will describe some of the highlights of that experience in the next section.

Setup and Usage Notes

After installing the Viper VP4300 and replacing the PlayStation 5’s big white plastic panels, I powered the console up and was greeted by this:

I installed it correctly! And, since this was a new drive straight out of the factory-sealed package, I felt comfortable formatting and erasing all of the nothing on the drive. The format took a few seconds (I wasn’t able to snap an in-focus photo during that short process).

Upon completion, I was presented with this:

At the conclusion of the format the PlayStation 5 apparently takes it upon itself to perform a benchmark of the drive, with the result of this particular test being a read speed of 6348.503 MB/s.

I have no idea what parameters are used by the PS5 for this test, i.e. queue depth, file size, etc., and I’m not going to make any assumptions about performance relative to manufacturer claims until I test this in a PC.

In any case, this speed is MUCH faster than the HDD in my old PS4 Pro, and since my plan all along was to transfer PS4 titles from the internal SSD to this one, I should be doing very well here.

The drive was now installed, formatted, and ready to use. And with 1.02 TB of available space, I set to work transferring ALL of the PS4 software from the PS5’s internal SSD over to this Viper VP4300.

I quickly discovered that transferring over the 373.2 GB of PS4 software from the internal SSD over to the newly configured Viper VP4300 was a very simple process from the console’s “Games and Apps in Console Storage” screen.

After checking all the right boxes (don’t judge the software – this is primarily my son’s console) I clicked the “move” button and only had to wait a few minutes for the transfer to complete.

After the transfer’s successful completion I now have a PS5 with 60% free space on the internal SSD (395.7 GB of 667.2 GB), and still have another 671.9 GB of free space on the Viper VP4300. And I just have the 1TB version, so just imagine how much extra space I’d be enjoying right now with the 2TB one! (Uh, just add 1TB. You don’t have to imagine anything.)

I have thus far noticed absolutely zero difference in loading and playing the games I transferred over to the Patriot SSD, and the console makes the change transparent to the user once it’s completed. I simply select the same game from the same icon, and it loads. I don’t know if I was expecting anything else.

Final Thoughts

For a proper performance review I guess I should not only test this in a PC, but also load PS5 games and use a stopwatch or a high-speed camera to time the exact difference in loading times versus the internal SSD – but who wants to do that? Besides, I’m guessing a lot of PS5 users (all several dozen of you) play more PS4 games than PS5 at this point. Or maybe that’s just me.

In any case the Viper VP4300 is a fine option for adding an M.2 drive to your PS5, based on my experience, and I appreciate that users have the option of two different heatspreader/heatsink options in the box. This is just as much a PC storage device, of course, and I am interested in seeing how its InnoGrit controller stacks up to the competition in more advanced workload testing. But I really don’t want to take the drive out of my PS5 now.

Once again I’ll cover pricing, which remains $139.99 on Amazon for the 1TB version as I publish this. Hopefully that price sticks, as this is a very nice value at that “35% off list price” level. At this price I think it’s an easy recommendation for both PC and PS5 users.