Packaging & Contents
The Supersonic Xpress ships on a small cardboard flat pack with a plastic bubble housing the drive. There are read/write speeds of 50/20 MB/s clearly indicated on the front of the package. We like the fact that Patriot put the read/write figures right on the box, a lot of the other manufacturers like to leave you guessing. There is a graph on the back of the box demonstrating the difference between the theoretical maximum transfer rates on USB 3.0 5120 Mbit/s vs USB 2.0 480 Mbit/s. We find this to be misleading as the vast majority of flash drives, including this one operate no where near the theoretical maximum. There is also a warning on the back of the box 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 Xpress measures 5.5cm long, 2cm wide and 0.9cm high. Due to its shape the Supersonic Xpress looks a lot smaller in the hand than the dimensions would indicate, that's because the dimensions quoted for the drive are at the widest point, the other half of this drive is a lot smaller. In terms of weight at 10 grams the Supersonic Xpress is one of the lightest drives.
Build Quality
The Supersonic Xpress has excellent build quality. We always prefer retractable flash drives as they protect the connector without the risk of cap loss. Patriot have done a superb job on this one, the connector clunks in and out very precisely. There is a blue light in the end of the drive that flashes when the drive is in use. A slight weakness is the key chain connector which does not seem particularly robust.
Front
Back
Test System
The test rig was a high end Core-i7 workstation kitted out with a 256GB Solid State drive and 16GB of RAM. The system was designed to be overclocked to 5GHZ but for the benchmarks, only the stock frequencies of 1.6GHz idle, 3.4GHz active and 3.8GHz turbo boost were used.
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 Xpress scored 63/25 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. These figures are below average for a USB 3.0 flash drive. The strongest relative area of performance for this drive is its 4K read score of 14.2 which is the highest 4K read we have seen on a 16GB flash drive. This makes the drive well suited to tasks requiring lots of small reads. Unfortunately its not all good news as the 4K write score of 0.02 MB/s is amongst the worst we have seen. This drive is a good example of the fact that every flash drive has a unique performance profile, how well it will perform depends entirely on the workload its facing.
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 Xpress are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 63/20 MB/s come in just over Patriot's claimed read/write speeds of 50/20 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 Xpress would take 63.09 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 Xpress performed relatively very well in this test.
AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test
Conclusion
The Supersonic Xpress has a great physical form, the innovative retractable design features a spring loaded back which snaps into place very satisfyingly, it's tempting to pop it in and out for no particular reason. In terms of performance the Xpress is below average across the board with the exception of an outstandingly high 4K read score of 14.2 MB/s. From a value perspective this drive is near the bottom of the pack, it has below average performance and is currently retailing at an above average price.
Original Review by: Updated 11 years ago.
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