Patriot is best known for its solid-state drives and aftermarket RAM upgrades, but it does have other strings to its bow, as the Supersonic Magnum demonstrates. It’s a USB flash drive, but with a difference: touting USB 3, write speeds of 120MB/sec and read speeds of 200MB/sec, it promises to be the fastest flash drive we’ve ever seen.
It all comes sealed in a good-looking, slim aluminium enclosure, and weighs a pocket-friendly 24g. It feels sturdy enough to survive rattling around in a bag or pocket, and our only practical complaint is that the lid has a tendency to come off rather too easily.
Within the Supersonic Magnum’s dainty housing, Patriot has squeezed in a single-chip, eight-channel USB 3 controller, plus 64GB of MLC NAND flash (a 128GB version is also available). This contributes to very quick performance indeed.
Our Windows file-copy tests saw the Patriot write large files at 114MB/sec and read them back at 169MB/sec, much faster than the SSD-based Iomega SSD Flash, and streets in front of bog-standard USB 2 drives. AS SSD told a similar story: sequential write and read speeds just exceeded Patriot’s claims, with results of 121MB/sec and 205MB/sec respectively.
Taxing the Patriot with smaller file sizes saw those figures tumble dramatically. Writing 15,000 small files in our own Windows file-copy tests dropped the transfer rate to only 4.6MB/sec, while reading those files back from the Patriot gave an average throughput of 24.1MB/sec. Pushing the drive even harder with AS SSD’s 4K tests saw the Supersonic Magnum flounder, with write speeds of 0.2MB/sec and read speeds of 7MB/sec. In both tests, the drive became noticeably toasty to the touch.
Still, it’s worth emphasising that these small file transfers aren’t the kind of scenario you’ll regularly meet under real-world usage; by any standards, this is comfortably the quickest thumb drive we’ve reviewed.
The more pressing question is one of cost: at £138, the Supersonic Magnum finds itself in a rather tough position. The ultimate in pocket-sized performance was never going to be cheap, but at £2.49 per formatted gigabyte, it will be more than most people can stomach.
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