Patriot SuperSonic 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

Testing:

To test the performance of the Patriot SuperSonic 64GB USB 3.0 drive, I will be using a series of utilities designed to benchmark the drive. The first utility is called Flash Memory Toolkit, which has a free demo available and will be used to do the testing. This utility consists of a low level read test, which will check memory bandwidth on the device, and then a write test of different file sizes designed to show how well the drive performs at saving information. The next benchmark will be the SiSoft Sandra benchmark, specifically the Removable Storage test. Finally, to get a real world look at the performance, I will time how long it takes to write custom files to the drive. These custom files are the same ones we use for the WinRAR benchmark in other reviews. All thumb drives will be formatted before testing and plugged directly into the motherboard using a port on the rear I/O panel.

Testing Setup:

• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965
• Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE
• Motherboard: ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3
• Memory: Mushkin Blackline 996744 DDR3-1600MHz
• Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 5870
• Power Supply: Mushkin XP-800AP 800W PSU
• HDD: 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA w/ 32MB Cache
• Optical Drive: LG Supermulti DVD-R/W
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Comparison Drives:

• Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB

Read Speed - Low Level Benchmark:

This is the first benchmark from Flash Memory Toolkit. This test outputs a speed in megabytes per second and a "times" factor. For both scores, higher is better.

In this first series of tests the USB 3.0 interface of the SuperSonic drive tripled the read and write times over the USB 2.0 tests.