Supersonic Boost XT USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Supersonic Boost ships in a flat piece of glossy cardboard with a plastic bubble encasing the unit. There is a claimed read speed of 90MB/s qualified with a cautious 'based on internal testing' warning at the bottom of the packaging. On the Patriot website a read speed of 30MB/s is also cautiously quoted. The drive comes with a generous five year warranty.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Supersonic Boost XT weighs 14 grams and measures 6.0cm long, 2.0cm wide and 1.2cm high which makes it one of the bulkier drives we have seen. Even though the drive is very short at just 6.0cm long its brick like proportions make it bulky. The drive is encased in a rubbery housing which makes it relatively resistant to shock and accounts for the drives 'Rugged' branding. With these dimensions this flash drive obstructs adjacent ports on a computer so you might need to get an extension cable if you have a lot of devices connected to the same cluster of USB ports on your PC. In terms of weight the drive is heavier than most but only by a few grams.

Build Quality

The Supersonic Boost has a chunky feel to it. We are pretty sure you could throw it off a tall building and find no harm had come to your data. This is mostly thanks to the generous rubber casing that houses the drive. There is a small LED indicator on the front of the drive and there is a loop on one end of the drive where you can attach a key ring or if you don't have the drive attached to a key ring you can slot the cap onto the back of the drive while its in use. The cap slides off easier than we would like putting it 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

Every flash drive has its own performance profile which is heavily influenced by its controller. Some drives perform very well when moving large files around, others are better at reading small files etc. The Supersonic Boost XT has an interesting performance profile, whilst just missing its claimed sequential read speed of 90MB/s it performed very well in the in the random 4K write test managing to beat significantly more expensive drives. At the same time the random read scores were very weak at just 2.3MB/s. For the most part flash drives are used to move relatively large files around ( music, images, video) so the 4K random write score is not generally that important.

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

This drive missed its claimed read speeds of 90MB/s on the CrystalMark benchmark but it scored almost spot on 90MB/s on the ATTO disk benchmark. Despite the better read speed recorded by ATTO the write speed still only clocked in at 20MB/s. 20MB/s is in line with the CrystalMark result and about 10 MB/s short of the maximum claimed write speed.

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

The Supersonic Boost XT would take 68.56 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB file which is equivalent to 15.67MB/s. Given that this drive only scored 20MB/s in the write test this is higher than expected but in absolute terms its still one of the slower scores we have seen.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Supersonic boost has an interesting performance profile. The drive put in an excellent performance in the random 4K write test where it significantly outperformed more expensive drives but it scored very poorly in the random 4K read test. So where does that leave us? Well it really depends on the intended use for the drive. The strongest aspect of this drives performance is its outright read speed which is a very respectable 85MB/s and for most flash drive users that's the figure that's going to make the most difference.

USBFlashPro
level
1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 12 years ago.