Patriot PXD – high speed in a chewing gum pack size

Overview

External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model.

PXD Portable SSD

We usually introduce you Patriot products in a game version under the Viper brand, but this time it is purely a Patriot product. Although PXD is not the first external SSD of this manufacturer, they already had the ELVR model with Thunderbolt 3, it can be said that PXD is the first mass product, mainly due to availability.

A classic paper packaging contains the SSD itself and a pair of cables, one with a USB-C pair and the other with a combination of USB type A and C. The SSD uses USB 3.2 gen 2 with a bandwidth of 10 Gb/s for transfers. It promises sequential speed of around 1000 MB/s for both write and read, which is significantly more than we have seen with external SSDs so far.

The design is simple but purposeful. The aluminium body has a slight blue tint, rounded edges and relatively compact dimensions. I would compare its size to a pack of chewing gum. PXD is similarly thin but longer. The front and back of the disk are black. There is a single USB-C port on the front and a connection indicating LED next to it.

It will be best to show the dimensions in comparison with other external SSDs, so we will compare the PXD with the already mentioned T5 and Portable SSD from SanDisk. As you can see, the PXD is about half the thickness of competing models, although it’s a bit longer than the SanDisk. The smaller dimensions were also reflected in the weight, which is only 35 grams. In comparison, SanDisk has 42 grams and Samsung 50 grams.

Testing took place as always on the Z390 chipset, specifically on the Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Xtreme motherboard with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor and 32 GB 3600 MHz DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum, from which 25 GB was allocated to the RAM disk.

External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model. We will see if this is the case as well.

Write: practical tests

Practical write tests show us excellent results compared to other external SSDs we have tested so far. Shows well the generational difference compared to “older” SSDs, which had a performance limit of 500 MB/s, and this “new” one, which pushed paper performance up to 1 GB/s. Real speeds are, of course, lower, but the differences are still more than significant. With a 9 GB file, we can talk about up to twice the speed, for example, compared to T5. We see smaller hesitations with 5–10 MB files, where the PXD is only as fast as the other two SSDs, but it shows its power again with 12–59 kB files, where it achieves up to 10 times higher performance. For T5 and SanDisk, this test lasted up to 20 minutes, for PXD less than two minutes.

Write: synthetic tests

The synthetic test approaches paper speed in sequential writing attacking 900 MB/s. Access time or double 4K write speed against the older external SSDs is also very good. Conversely, with 4K 64 threads, you can see the same lower performance as with 5–10 MB files. As it is an SSD with TLC memory, a pSLC buffer is also used to speed it up. It has a relatively small capacity for 1 TB SSD, only 24 GB. When it is full, sequential write performance naturally declines, but still holds a fairly decent and stable 245 MB/s.

External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model. We will see if this is the case as well.

Read: practical tests

Read tests show a clear dominance of PXD and this time without hesitation. The differences compared to the fastest competition in a given test are between 30/60/140%, which is certainly not negligible.

Reading: synthetic tests

Synthetic read tests again show near-paper speeds with sequential read speed exceeding 900 MB/s. Access time is as good as writing and again more than twice as fast as the competition. As with the practical tests, read does not suffer from any performance drops in 4K 64 threads as it did during write, so I have nothing to complain about here.

External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model. We will see if this is the case as well.

Overall score and performance in macOS

The overall score shows Patriot’s clear victory over both SanDisk and Samsung. We are also adding a new test for maximum sequential write on macOS in the Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test application on MacBook Pro 16″. Here we see speeds at the level of 900 MB/s again, which confirms the results from Windows.

External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model. We will see if this is the case as well.

Rating

Patriot, again, did not disappoint and PXD Portable SSD is a very neat external SSD. I praise the compact dimensions, good build quality and, above all, the great performance, which is significantly higher than on the previous generation of external SSDs. It can be said that the novelty performs up to twice as well as the previously tested pieces, but only under certain conditions. Perhaps the biggest difference was seen when working with 1 GB and 12–59 kB files, where the PXD quickened the transfers up to 10 times compared to Samsung and SanDisk. This is pretty unseen. Primarily, however, you will enjoy high speeds especially when transferring large video files, etc. Then you will attack the magic border of 1 GB/s.

The chassis heating is kept safely below 50 ºC even with intense use of maximum power. In a few minutes of sequential reading (at an ambient air temperature of 21 ºC), the average temperature stabilized at 44 ºC with a 46-degree maximum in a place above the controller. So even from the cooling point of view, the combination of high performance in such a small body is fine.

There really isn’t much to criticize. We’ve seen some write performance drops in some form of files, after the pSLC buffer was filled, but the worst case scenario was that PXD was as fast as the competition, which I certainly wouldn’t call a disaster. The SSD has a 3-year warranty, is compatible with both Windows and macOS, which we tried, and looking for some other negatives is quite difficult. Maybe the absence of HW encryption or increased robustness as with SanDisk, but let’s say, most users will not use this and when you need something like that you will reach for something other than PXD. Finally, only the price remains, which is surprisingly good. The tested 1 TB piece can be obtained for as little as 160 euros, which is the price at which you normally buy an internal 1 TB NVMe SSD. But now you can have this SSD with you everywhere…

Patriot PXD Portable SSD receives the Go for it! recommendation from us for great performance, exemplary build quality, compact dimensions with minimal negatives and a very favorable price.

• 512 GB – 3 199 CZK/118 EUR
• 1 TB – 4 990 CZK/185 EUR
• 2 TB – 7 999 CZK/295 EUR

• Contents
• Overview
• Write
• Read
• Overall score and performance in macOS
• Rating