Photos and Breakdown

Much like the packaging for the Ignite M2, with this being such a small drive I don’t have any casing or features to look into. I can however talk a little about the various M.2 sizes and connections so before you consider picking up this drive you know if it will work for your motherboard. Basically there are three things to consider with an M.2 drive. For starters (and we already talked about this) you can get an M.2 SSD in both a SATA drive or a PCIe drive, the Ignite M2 is the latter. Some devices will only support M.2 SATA for example.

Next we have to consider the keying, this is the connection where it plugs in. There are three types you can run into. A B key, M key, or a B & M Key. Basically a B key gives you a x2 PCIe connection, the M Key gives you a x4 PCIe. In this case the Ignite has a B & M Key. There are a whole list of other Key options depending on how the slot is used, but those are the two/three that apply to SSDs. THEN there are different lengths. If you look at your motherboard you will see different screw holes at different lengths. Our MSI board has three the 2280, 2260, and 2242, the Patriot drive is a 2280 so we are all set.  

So now that we know a little about the M.2 connection and we know our Ignite M2 is a 2280 length SATA 3 drive we can take a look at the drive itself. To get all of the required information onto the drive Patriot had to stick a white sticker right on the drive across the top. This is all of the standard stuff that you would find on the bottom of an SSD but packed in a smaller space. We have the required government logos as well as the capacity, model number, and branding. I didn’t see a serial number to track the drives though unless I missed something.

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When we carefully pull the sticker off that voids the warranty on the Ignite M2 we can see right away that the drive does have a Phison PS3110-S10 controller, the same controller that the other Ignite has as well. Along side of it are two NAND dies. Sadly after spending a bunch of time trying to figure out what they were specifically I couldn’t find anything. The dies have IP8AG5SAPH K1510 9604117.007 on them. We do know that Patriot is calling them MLC NAND and that they have a capacity of 128 GB each for a total of 512 on the drive. From there the Ignite M2 is overprovisioned from 512 back down to 480. Over provisioning leaves room on the drive to replace any NAND flash cells that erode over time. In other words this buffer will extend the potential life of the drive.

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On the back of the Ignite M2 we have a small Nanya DDR3 chip with a capacity of 256MB as a cache. The chip number is NT5CC256M15CP-01. From what I can tell this is a standard 1333 MHz part. Also on the back are two more NAND dies bringing us up to a total of four.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36655 13 May 2015 21:05
Hey everyone, today I take a look at a SATA based M.2 drive from Patriot. The Patriot Ignite M2, enjoy!

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