Patriot Memory's Viper PV553 PCIe 5.0 SSD Gets Ready To Strike At A Blistering 12.4GB/s
Your options for selecting a solid state drive with a PCI Express 5.0 interface are few and far between, and even more so if you whittle down candidates to ones that are actually in stock. Don't despair, though, as more hyper-fast SSDs are coming soon. One of them is Patriot Memory's Viper PV553, which is due for a full unveil in a couple of weeks at Computex.
Patriot Memory is getting a bit of a head start on the event by teasing a couple of storage and RAM products that it plans to showcase. As it pertains to the former, the Viper PV553 will take its place as Patriot Memory's flagship flash storage product.
We only have a few details to share at the moment but they're juicy ones. According to Patriot Memory, the Viper PV553 will ship in the M.2 2280 form factor with rated sequential read and write speeds of up to 12,400MB/s (12.4GB/s) and 11,800MB/s (11.8GB/s), respectively.
It will also come with a somewhat chunky aluminum heatsink sporting an active cooling fan to keep temps in check. Thermal management is more important than ever as the latest generation SSDs push speeds into new tiers of performance. As we've recently seen, blazing-fast speeds are quicker to throttle.
In some cases, PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been observed generating errors or even shutting down when getting too hot. In other cases, they can slow to HDD performance levels without the benefit of a heatsink. This was brought to light in reviews of Corsair's MP700 SSD.
Fortunately, there are efforts being made to mitigate the issue. Phison recently issued a statement saying it's in the process of validating updated firmware that will prevent these issues from occurring.
"Our firmware engineering teams have already isolated the problem and made the necessary adjustments to the thermal throttle curve within hours of the report. However, the new firmware must undergo Phison’s strict validation process before our partners can release it to customers. Rest assured our partners will notify end-users as soon as the validated update is available," Phison told Tom's Hardware.
Phison also clarified that any drives built around its E26 controller are intended to be used with a heastink, regardless of whether the SSD maker includes one or not.
That said, it's not clear if the Patriot Memory's Viper PV553 SSD will be utilize Phison's E26 controller or something else. InnoGrit has also demonstrated PCIe 5.0 controller hardware and Patriot Memory has been known to use InnoGrit in the past (as is the case with its P400 SSD). There's also Silicon Motion.
In addition to the upcoming SSD, Patriot Memory also teased (PDF) an Xtreme5 DDR5 memory kit with RGB memory that promises to "smoke the competition."
