Photos and Features

The Patriot P400 isn’t one of Patriots gaming focused SSDs with the Viper branding. The P400 gets a much more mainstream look and something you would expect to see on the shelf or in this case hanging from a peg in a brick and mortar store. The P400 has a hanging card packaging with the drive itself featured right on the front behind its clear plastic. The rest of the front has the Patriot logo in blue with a darker blue for a backdrop and they have kept things simple with the Patriot logo then the P400 branding below that. Under that, they do let you know that this is a PCIe Gen 4 drive and for the capacity, they use a sticker up in the top right corner with the 1TB capacity in the largest font. Interestingly enough we can also see that they are planning for more in the future with the performance rating down at the bottom. They have this listed as high performance, but they have also left some room for something faster. Then around on the back, they have a really short feature list that mentioned the possible read speeds, that this is a PCIe 4 drive, and that they have capacities up to 2TB. That last one is interesting because right now they only go up to 1TB. Those are then repeated across multiple languages. IN the bottom half they have the Patriot social media links and addresses and phone numbers for all of their different offices.

I like that Patriot kept the styling of the P400 simple. It has a black PCB and on top of that a black sticker over everything. The sticker is a very thin graphene heatsink, similar to what Sabrent drives have been using for a while now to pull heat out across the drive without the bulkiness of a normal heatsink. It has a white stripe with the P400 name on it and of course repeating that this is a PCIe M.2 Gen 4 x4 SSD. Then above that the Patriot logo as well. All in all, it looks good and isn’t too flashy. Sadly with most motherboards, it will be covered up.

Then on the back of the drive, there is a traditional sticker. This side of the drive doesn’t have anything on the PCB so they were able to put the sticker right on the PCB. This sticker isn’t trying to look good at all. It is just all white and gets right to the point with all of the important things that need to be on the drive. It has the drive model number and serial number including a bar code. It also has the certification logos and the drive capacity. There is also a warning that the warranty will be void if this sticker is removed. It doesn’t cover anything, so there isn’t any reason to remove it. But the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act says that these aren’t valid and having the warning itself can be considered illegal so I wouldn’t worry too much there at least in the US.

I did however take the graphene sticker off of the other side to see what Patriot is using for the P400 and let me just say what I always say with these. They are a big pain in the butt, if you bend them at all they don’t like to go back to normal which leads to much more dangerous ways to remove the sticker/heatsink that risks damage to the drive itself where a normal sticker isn’t a problem. What we have below all of that as I mentioned before is a black PCB. Then there are four NAD chip locations with only two being used. I guess their packaging mentioning 2TB drives in the future is correct, they have left room for it. I like that the NAND locations used are split up which keeps things even cooler. Then down at the end, there is a smaller chip for the controller. One thing that is missing is any RAM to be used for a cache meaning this is a DRAMLess drive. The controller has the Innogrit brand in big letters and below that it has the model number IG5220 which is Innogrit’s PCIe 4.0 dramless controller. The NAND is etched with PFMC-B8F46A1CD00 but I believe this is a rebranded Micron 176 Layer B47R Fortis NAND. Patriot is once again going with the upstart controller so it should be interesting to see how it performs and the DRAMless design does keep costs down and further shows that while they consider this a high performance drive, there is still room for faster in their product stack. Most likely saved for their Viper gaming lineup in the future.