Buying a low-cost SSD can be tricky as there are a number of entry-level NVMe drives on the market with now using a variety of controllers and NAND Flash. Patriot launched their P300 series of SSDs this month in capacities ranging from 128 GB all the way to 2 TB. Performance on these M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 3 x4 drives is said to be up to 2,100 MB/s sequential read and 1,650 MB/s sequential write speed with Random 4K performance rated at up to 290,000 IOPS read and 260,000 IOPS write.

These aren’t bad performance numbers, but what really got our attention is that there are two versions of this drive on the market. The US market gets a Patriot P300 with the Phison E13T controller and the rest of the world gets a Patriot P300 with a SMI 2263XT controller. Patriot is not disclosing the NAND Flash used by either model, but it will likely be 3D TLC NAND Flash by Micron or KIOXIA.