Patriot gets in on the portable PCIe SSD game, undercuts Samsung on price

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High speed storage you can take with you.

An epiphany seems to have hit storage makers, in that they're realizing they can stuff PCIe solid state drives into portable housings and sell them to users who need high-speed storage on-the-go. As such, Patriot today announced the EVLVR, a "groundbreaking" Thunderbolt 3 external SSD.

“EVLVR is an abbreviation for Evolver', and the technology itself presents a breakthrough evolution in SSD technology," Patriot says.

If you wade through the marketing hyperbole, what you'll find is a portable SSD that is similar to Samsung's recently announced SSD X5. It pairs a Phison E8 PCIe controller with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, and is rated to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,600MB/s and 1,000MB/s, respectively.

Technical jargon aside, it's really fast. To put those numbers into perspective, our favorite high-speed USB flash drive, Patriot's Supersonic Rage 2, is rated to deliver sequential reads of up to 400MB/s and sequential writes of up to 300MB/s. On paper, the EVLVR is three to four times faster.

Samsung's SSD X5 family is even faster, though. Those drives are rated to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,800MB/s and 2,300MB/s, respectively. However, the added speed comes at a cost. Here's how street pricing compares between the two drive families:

Samsung also sells at 2TB model for $1,397.99 on Amazon, whereas Patriot tops out at 1TB for the moment.

Patriot's new portable SSDs are all available now and backed by a 2-year warranty.

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Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).