Supersonic Pulse USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Supersonic Pulse ships on a small cardboard flat pack with a plastic bubble housing the drive. There are no read/write speeds indicated on the packaging. Patriot normally put the read/write figures right on the box, so we took this as a bad indicator for the performance of this drive. On the back of the box there is a warning advising that the drive's capacity will drop a little after you format it, this of course applies to all flash drives rather than this specific drive. The Supersonic Xpress comes with a two year warranty which is clearly printed on the back left of the package.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Supersonic Pulse measures 5.9cm long, 1.7cm wide and 0.8cm high. With these dimensions there is no chance that this flash drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer, the drive is barely thicker than the USB port its self. This flash drive weighs 9 grams making it both extremely light and small, one of the smallest we have seen.

Build Quality

The Supersonic Pulse has an excellent feel to it, its small and solid. There is a permanent blue light on the back of the drive which looks kind of cool and flashes when the drive is in operation. The cap attaches very snugly to the front of the drive reducing the risk of cap loss. At the back of the drive there is a hoop where you can attach a key ring. The hoop is not as solid as we would have liked and we suspect that there is a risk of it snapping off. Overall the Supersonic Pulse is a very compact and solid flash drive.

Front

Back

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The Supersonic Pulse scored 93/12 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. This is a very respectable headline sequential read score. The Supersonic Pulse has excellent all round read performance and very poor all round write performance. This type of asymmetrical read/write performance will only work out well for the small minority of users whose usage patterns are highly read orientated.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

ATTO Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Score

The ATTO results for the Supersonic Pulse are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and come in at 82/12 MB/s. Patriot do not publish speed claims for this drive, which is not surprising given the very slow headline write speed of 12 MB/s.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Real World Copy Speed Score

This test shows that the Supersonic Pulse would take 116.47 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates. The Supersonic Pulse performed relatively well in this test compared to our expectations but in absolute terms the performance was the worst we have seen so far. It will take approx 2 minutes to copy a 1GB Video file onto this flash drive which is slower than for a lot of USB 2.0 drives.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The SuperSonic Pulse is one of the smaller drives we have tested. This drive has excellent all round read performance and very poor all round write performance. An asymetrical read/write performance of this type will only work out for a small minority of users. From a value perspective this drive is slightly above average at the time of writing.

USBFlashPro
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Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.