Patriot Viper USB 3.1 Memory Review

Patriot Memory has sent us for Patriot Viper Ram Review. Today, we will be taking a look at their 64GB USB 3.1, Gen 1 Flash Drive. The Viper series of USB 3.1 series flash drives come in the capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB delivering the trifecta of user’s need which are mass storage, speed and value.

Using the single chip, USB 3.1 flash memory controller, these drives are capable of driving sequential read speeds up to 385MB/s which is quite a figure for the flash drives. The write speed on the 64GB drive is mere 40MB/s which was a bit surprising.

• Product:          Patriot Viper Ram Review
• Manufacturer:  Patriot Memory
• Brand:             Viper
• Availability:      Texon-Ware
• Price:              Check Price on Amazon

Viper USB 3.1 Flash Drive Specifications

Patriot Viper Packaging and Unboxing

The Patriot Viper Ram Review comes in a simple yet traditional paper packaging for the flash drives. On the front side, there is a Patriot brand name printed on the top left side under which there is a Viper brand name. The capacity of the drive is printed on the top right side which in our case is 64GB. It is USB 3.1, Gen 1 type which is backward compatible with the USB 2.0 and 1.1.

The drive is rated at 385MB/s Read speed. The drive is compatible with the PC and MAC. It is a capless design with 360° swivel. The drive can be seen in a transparent container packed inside the packaging. The backside of the packaging has Patriot and Viper brand names printed on the top left side. The drive is compliant with the USB 3.0 specifications and compatible with the USB 2.0 and 1.1 specifications.

This information is printed in 8 different languages. The Patriot is offering 5 years warranty on these drives, which speak for itself. Company’s contact information in different regions is printed on the lower section. The serial no sticker is pasted on the bottom right side. Drive’s compliance information to various specifications is printed in the label format on the left side of the serial no sticker. The drive is made in Taiwan.

Patriot Viper RGB Closer Look

Drive itself is simple in design. It has a two-tone design to it. The cover is in Maroon color’s shade while the body of the chip is in the black color. There is a Viper gaming brand logo name on the top of the cover n the white color. 64GB is printed under the Viper specifying the capacity of the drive. The rubber-coated, rugged USB and swing design, ensure greater protection of data.

The backside has a similar pattern through there is no branding on this side. The cover sliding is rugged and it swivels at 360°. The connector is in typical USB 3.0 color which is Blue. The build quality is right on the money. Here is what the Viper has to say for these drives, “The Viper USB 3.1 Gen.

1 flash drive delivers the trifecta of user needs; speed, mass storage, and value. With storage capacities ranging from 64GB to 256GB, the Viper USB provides gamers with a large amount of storage space needed to load the latest games and play anywhere. The rubber-coated, rugged USB and swing design, ensure greater protection of your data.

USB 3.1 technology enables the Patriot Viper USB to perform up to ten times faster than USB 2.0 drives, allowing a 2GB file to be transferred in mere seconds. The use of a single-chip USB 3.1 flash memory controller allows this flash drive to deliver sequential read performance at speeds up to 85MB/s read and 65MB/s write. The Viper USB flash drive is available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and carries a 5-year warranty.

It is compatible with Windows®10, Windows® 8, Windows® 7, Windows® Vista®, Windows® XP, Windows® 2000, Windows® ME, Linux 2.4 and later, Mac® OS9, X and later.”

This is a USB 3.1, Gen 1 type drive which is synonymous with a USB 3.0 specification but using the USB 3.1 flash memory controller hence the throughput is much higher than regular USB 3.0 drives. The 64GB is rated at whopping 385MB/s sequential read but the write speed is 40MB/s which could have been better within this price range.

Testing

We have tested this drive on the X99 platform. The test bench setup is as follow:

• Intel i7 6850k
• Asus Rampage V Edition 10
• Ballistix Elite 4x4GB 3000MHz DDR4
• Noctua NH-U14S
• Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD
• Seagate 2TB Barracuda
• Colorful iGame GTX 1050Ti
• Corsair AX1200i

To test the drive’s read and write speeds, we have used following software running on Microsoft Windows 10 x64 build version 16299:

• AS SSD 1.8.5636.37293
• ATTO Disk Benchmark 3.05
• CrystalDiskMark 6
• Anvil Pro Storage Utilities 1.1.0

The drive was connected to the USB 3.1 Type A port on the motherboard for the testing. We did not measure the performance of the drive on 4k Random Read/Write but have focused on the sequential read and write performance for it is not a regular SSD that we are talking about but the flash drive with limited space. Let’s take a look at the results.

Crystal Disk Mark has resulted in sequential read to be 336.8 MB/s which is lower than the rated 385MB/s sequential read speed of the drive by approximately 12.5%. The tested sequential write speed was 39.43MB/s which is approximately 1.425% lower than the rated write speed of 40MB/s and quite marginal. Our sequential write speed is validated on this software but the drive has struggled on the read speed.

Next, we run the AS SSD software to test the sequential read and write performance of the drive. The tested read speed was 398.56MB/s which is approximately 3.52% above the rated speed. The tested write speed was 40.09MB/s. The AS SSD has validated the rated read and write speeds on this drive. The first test was run using the transfer length of 1GB.

Next, we ran it on 3GB length and results shown a solid performance from the drive. The tested read speed was 400.65MB/s and the tested write speed was 36.90 MB/s. Too good for the flash drive performance. Next, we ran the AS SSD Compression Benchmark. Surprisingly the write speed was peaking at 220MB/s and we can see them dipping below the 18MB/s.

In our real-life testing, there was a minimum of 15.6MB/s write speeds on this drive. We can see the variation in the write speeds with highs and lows. Only 50% to 60% category shows a marginal variation otherwise each percentile has two ups and downs. We will come to this aspect later with real-life testing.

The read speed started above the 240MB/s which is too low for this drive but then we saw that the drive was held on the 400MB/s mark on the entire length of the test with few exceptions where the dips came to approximately 3650MB/s and 345MB/s. Overall, the read speed trend was consistent. Next, we ran the AS SSD Copy Benchmark.

For compressed files, the speed was 29..44MB/s with a duration of 36.48s. Generally, we would like to have high speeds with less duration. Speed for Programs was 12.14MB/s with a duration of 115.87s. For Game files, the speed was 23.16MB/s with a duration of 59.64s.

Next, we ran the ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the drive’s performance. On the default transfer length of 256MB with a complete range of transfer size, the read speed started to cross 300MB/s mark from 64KB transfer size. Whereas the drive stated crossing the 350MB/s above the 256KB transfer size.

For the transfer size of above 256KB, the speed variation was between the 350MB/s and 400MB/s for once when it actually crossed the 400MB/s on 48MB transfer size. The write speed is low on this drive as is evident from the picture. Looking closely at the graph would show that it twice came close to the rated 40MB/s write speed and remains below this mark for the rest of the transfer sizes.

Next, we set the transfer length to the size of 2GB and ran the benchmark with the complete range of transfer size. This is where the drive has excelled in the read speed category. The drive entered in 300MB/s category above the 64KB transfer size and remained consistent above the 512KB transfer size with above 400MB/s read speed.

This is too good a performance to speak of. The write speeds were consistent above the 1MB transfer size and were almost reaching the rated 40MB/s write speed.

Next, we ran the Anvil Storage Utilities benchmark to test the performance of the drive. On the default test size of 1GB, the tested read speed was 399.61MB/s with 10s of response time. The write speed was 39.22MB/s with 101.98s response time. Response time is enough to show that slow write speeds on this drive. Next, we set the test size to 2GB and ran the benchmark again.

The read speed came out to be 402.04MB/s in 9.942s response time with marginal improvement on the stock test size. The tested write speed of the drive was 38.47MB/s with 103.97s response time. Write speeds seem to be suffering from the increase in the test size. Overall, the rated read and write speeds were validated.

Next, we put the drive in data copying test on our test bench using real data. The time take for the data transfer was taken using a stopwatch and we did not use the windows reported time for this purpose. First, we transferred the data set comprising of 133 files of different sizes with a total size of 1.13GB from SSD to the USB drive. This graph shows the data writing speeds and the time taken to write the files in the flash drive.

It took 38.23 seconds to copy complete data set to the Viper 64GB USB 3.1 flash drive. The average data writing speed was 30MB/s with the maximum being 33.12MB/s. There were quite dips in the write speeds. The lowest was 4.27MB/s. Still, 38.23 seconds is a good one given the size of the dataset and that files were of different sizes.

Then we copied the same data set back to the SSD and it took less than 2 seconds to copy the data set of 1.13GB from the Viper USB Flash drive to the storage drive. That is an impressive feat for sure.

Then we took 5 files ensuring that minimum size of each file was 2GB. The total size of this data set was 12.3GB. We copied the data from the Seagate 2TB Barracuda to the drive. Below graph shows the result.

It took 363 seconds to copy this data from the HDD to the Viper USB Flash drive. Maximum write speed was 48.19MB/s with a minimum being 16.18MB/s and average speed being 33.24MB/s. The drive’s performance is actually good with large size files than with the small size files as is evident from our testing.

Next, we copied the data from the Viper 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive to the Samsung 840 Evo 250GB SSD and the Seagate 2TB Barracuda HDD one by one. Below graph shows the result.

As expected, it took less time to copy the data on to the SSD than the HDD and copying rate was higher for the SSD than the HDD. It took 40 seconds to copy this data set to the SSD as compared to the 90 seconds needed for the HDD. Average copying speed for the SSD was 289MB/s as compared to the 125MB/s for the HDD.

Maximum speed was 397MB/s for the SSD and 395MB/s for the HDD. These high speeds for momentarily at the start of the copying task. Minimum speed was 264MB/s for the SSD and 114MB/s for the HDD. This is evident that bottleneck was not from the Viper 64GB USB 3.1 flash drive but from the slow write speed of the HDD.

The last step of our testing was to uncompress the 3.33GB file on to the Samsung 840 Evo 250GB SSD and Seagate 2TB Barracuda HDD. Below graph shows the result. There was not much of a difference in both. It took 37.53 seconds to uncompress this data on to the SSD and 38.5 seconds on to the HDD.

Conclusion

The Patriot Viper Ram Review come in the capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB delivering the trifecta of user’s need which are mass storage, speed and value. Using the single chip, USB 3.1 flash memory controller, these drives are capable of driving sequential read speeds up to 385MB/s which is quite a figure for the flash drives. The write speed on a 64GB drive is mere 40MB/s. Drive itself is simple in design.

It has a two-tone design to it. The cover is in Maroon color’s shade while the body of the chip is in the black color. There is a Viper gaming brand logo name on the top of the cover n the white color. 64GB is printed under the Viper specifying the capacity of the drive. The rubber-coated, rugged USB and swing design, ensure greater protection of data.

The backside has a similar pattern through there is no branding on this side. The cover sliding is rugged and it swivels at 360°. The connector is in typical USB 3.0 color which is Blue. The build quality is right on the money. This is a USB 3.1, Gen 1 type drive which is synonymous with a USB 3.0 specification but using the USB 3.1 flash memory controller hence the throughput is much higher than regular USB 3.0 drives. The Patriot Memory is giving 5 years of warranty on these flash drives which shows the confidence of the manufacturer in their products.

With storage capacities ranging from 64GB to 256GB, the Viper USB provides gamers with a large amount of storage space needed to load the latest games and play anywhere. In our synthetic testing the drive has surpassed the rated read speed of 385MB/s which is too good for your bucks.

Similar was the case with the rated write speed which is 40MB/s for the 64GB version. My only gripe is with this lower speed on this otherwise truly a faster yet valued product. Our own testing using the real life data shows the impressive read speed ranging from data set containing files of different sizes to a data set with large size data files. Write speed on the other hands has more variations with regard to the size of the files being copied.

We are thankful to the Patriot Memory Pakistan for giving us the opportunity to Patriot Viper Ram Review.

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