Patriot SuperSonic Magnum USB 3.0 flash drive review

Final words and conclusion

The Patriot SuperSonic Magnum is an impressive USB stick alright. Nothing about it is complicated, pop it into a USB 3.0 host and you are good to go.

Like any traditional USB Flash disk, write performance will be severely limited when you are dealing with lots and lots of small files. But is that the actual uintended sage for a USB disk? You surely are not using it say as an SSD. So we don't think so, it's with MP3 files, movies, zip-files, ISO and pretty much large files where a stick like this shows it's muscle.

One generic note to the industry (both chassis makers and USB storage manufacturers) through, USB flash disks seem to get wider and wider in size, and that's impractical as often they do not fit into the USB port anymore. See the sample above with the spanking new Obsidian 650D chassis from Corsair.

The controller can address eight channels of NAND simultaneously, that design combined with the performance that USB 3.0 has to offer will then show us the advertised speeds of well above 100 MB/sec write performance and even over 200 MB/sec READ performance. That makes the SuperSonic Magnum on of  the fastest flash sticks we have ever used. The Patriot Supersonic Magnum is available in just two capacity sizes; 64GB and 128GB.

Additional tests showed that copying a database backup of roughly 450MB (GZip)  towards the SS Magnum took roughly 3 seconds, copying it back to the RAMDisk .. less then 2 seconds. Copying a DVD ISO towards thee stick takes just under 40 seconds.

It's stuff like that that brings a smile to my face as anno 2011 we do not like to wait on a PC copying files right?

The one thing we did notice that after stressing it hard, the storage unit will get very warm. After several benchmark runs the device actually gets hot, well above body temperature. Heat is never good. So the impact of that and the verdict is still out on that one. The Supersonic Magnum surpasses its advertised read and write rates in our sequential performance benchmarks but as stated it will be slower with small write files,  small file I/O operations remain a bottleneck, but this is a USB flash disk. 

Remember,  if you can’t find a USB 3.0 port, it will work just fine at USB 2.0 speeds. And yeah, Patriot claims read speeds can reach up to 200MB/s and write speeds up to 120MB/s when used in conjunction with a USB 3.0 host, and yeah that's true we confirm it. At 150 EUR it surely is not cheap, but if money is not the issue then we can wholeheartedly recommend the product.

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