Element USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Patriot Element ships on a flat piece of cardboard with a plastic bubble wrap. On the front of package the capacity is stated and there is a stamp indicating the grade (26.9815) of its aluminium body. The back of the package states that the drive has a two year warranty and that a driver will not be required for most operating systems (it doesn't specify which). Finally there are references to the compactness of the drive. There is no mention of speed either on the packaging or on the Patriot website. All to often this indicates below average benchmark performance.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Patriot Element measures 3.2cm long, 1.2cm wide and .5cm high which is absolutely tiny. Approximately one third of the body of the drive slips into a USB socket. This is the smallest USB 3.0 flash drive we have ever seen on every measurement except length where the PQI Intelligent Drive Micro is ever so slightly shorter at 3.1cm. As well as being the smallest drive we have seen to date, the Element is also the lightest. Weighing just 2 grams it is nearly half the weight of the next lightest, also the PQI which weighs 3.8 grams.

Build Quality

The Patriot Element is reasonably well constructed. The tiny body is made of aluminium. The back of the drive has a small transparent section through which a blue indicator light can be seen flashing whislt the drive is in operation. The transparent back section houses a hole for a key ring lanyard but it is made of very thin plastic so puts the drive at risk of loss.

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 Patriot Element was unable to maintain a USB 3.0 connection for more than about 60 seconds without resetting. As a result we were unable to obtain USB 3.0 speed readings for this drive. Instead we have provided the USB 2.0 speeds which where less than 35 MB/s can be assumed to be reasonably representative of how the drive would perform on a USB 3.0 connection. The only readings which hit the USB 2.0 limit were the sequential and 512K read speeds which we estimate would actually come in at around 85 MB/s, just over double the observed values of 34 and 35 MB/s. Overall the performance of this drive is very poor and the drive stands amongst the slowest USB 3.0 drives we have tested to date.

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 Patriot Element were also taken on a USB 2.0 connection and are in line with its CrystalDiskMark scores. It's not surprising that Patriot do not indicate speeds for this drive as they are significantly below par.

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 Patriot Element would take 141.91 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. The score is above expectations as generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates. Although above expectations the outright figure is still the slowest we have seen to date.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Patriot Element is the second Micro USB 3.0 flash drive we have seen, unlike its predecessor, the PQI Micro USB, it was released in 2013. We had high hopes for this drive, it would have been great to have a micro drive that delivered true USB 3.0 speeds. Sadly our test unit would not even function correctly on a USB 3.0 port so our tests had to be run on USB 2.0. Based on the drive's performance on the USB 2.0 connection we are not optimistic that USB 3.0 would make much difference to the abysmal performance we observed. Generally USB 2.0 only limits speeds below 35 MB/s and only two of the Patriot Element's speeds bested this. In terms of aesthetics the drive is nice, but even the lanyard attachment is dubious. Sadly the only positive thing we can say about this dive is its size which is absolutely tiny, in fact this is almost certainly the smallest USB 3.0 drive in the world.

USBFlashPro
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1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 10 years ago.