Patriot EVLVR Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD Review: Sleek, Snappy, Solid

Name: Patriot EVLVR Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD
Brand: Patriot

by Shannon Robb — Thursday, November 29, 2018, 11:00 AM EDT

Patriot EVLVR NVMe TB3 SSD: Test Setup, SANDRA, ATTO Benchmarks

Page 3: Patriot EVLVR NVMe TB3 SSD: Test Setup, SANDRA, ATTO Benchmarks

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard for the internal drives was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing where applicable, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Windows Quiet Hours was enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i9 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Thunderbolt Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i9-9900K

MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC

Intel HD Graphics 630

ASUS ThunderboltEX 3

32GB DDR4

Realtek High Definition Audio

Samsung 512GB NVMe (OS)
Patriot EVLVR(1TB)

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64
Intel 10.1.17711.8088
DirectX 12

Intel HD 24.20.100.6291

Benchmarks Used:
ATTO v.2.47
CrystalDiskmarkAS SSD
SiSoftware Sandra 2018

SiSoft SANDRA

Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

First up, we have some numbers with SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run on unformatted drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

The Patriot EVLVR does a commendable job beating out all of the SATA based drives, as you would expect. It pulls some solid numbers, with over 1500MB/s reads and 687MB/s writes. The Samsung X5, which is another Thunderbolt 3 powered drive we reviewed recently, easily outpaces the EVLVR, thanks to its PCIe x4 SSD which offers double the theoretical bandwidth. It is worth noting that the Samsung unit has a price of $699.99 which is 39% higher, though.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose 4kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

The Patriot EVLVR pulls a quick ramp up and at 32KB and holds a steady line across the board. Interestingly, the Samsung X5 drive holds pretty solid in the write test, but reads aren't as consistent. They tank at the 512K mark and drop down to the 1000MB/s mark as it approaches the 8MB transfer size. Meanwhile the Patriot EVLVR holds a solid line straight across the board.