Review

Packaging & Contents Dimensions & Weight Build Quality CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test ATTO Benchmark Speed Test AS-SSD Benchmark Speed Test Conclusion

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.

Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB Box Front
Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB 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.

Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB Length Ruler

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.

Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB Front
Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB 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.
Motherboard ASUS P8Z68-V GEN 3
RAM Corsair Vengeance 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 (CML16GX3M4A1600C9)
Fixed Drive Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
CPU Intel Core i7-2600K
Operating System Windows 7

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

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

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

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 12 years ago.  
Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 30 16GB Front

Average Bench: 15% (339th of 639)

Based on 91 user benchmarks.  Device: VID 13fe PID 5000 Model: Patriot Memory

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. [Jun '12 USBFlashPro]

Poor: 9%Average: 15% Great: 20%

Terrible average bench

The Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 16GB averaged 84.9% lower than the peak scores attained by the group leaders. This isn't a great result which indicates that there are much faster alternatives on the comparison list.

Strengths

Avg. 4K Random Read Speed 8.69MB/s
Avg. Sustained Write Speed 23.1MB/s

Very good consistency

The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 16GB is just 10.9%. This is a relatively narrow range which indicates that the Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 16GB performs reasonably consistently under varying real world conditions.

Weaknesses

Avg. 4K Random Mixed IO Speed 0.05MB/s
Avg. 4K Random Write Speed 0.06MB/s

Average Bench

(Based on 91 samples)
Min Avg Max
27.5 Read 56 80.1
15.1 Write 22.2 31.1
10.6 Mixed 19.4 32
17.6 SusWrite 23.1 41.1
35.2% 30.2 MB/s
Min Avg Max
3.3 4K Read 8.69 13.9
0 4K Write 0.06 0.4
0 4K Mixed 0.05 0.5
35.8% 2.93 MB/s
User Benchmarks BenchSequentialRandom 4kDeep queue 4k
The fastest USB (mainstream) averages a speed of 100%
91 MORE »

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MSRP ≈ $29 @ launch in Jul '11
AmazonUS $257 years
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 Comments

16GB Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 Flash Drive...

Added 12 years ago.

Liked (edit your comment) Add link

7 years ago.

Deal  slickdeals.net/...

$5 + Free Shipping (After $5 rebate - 8GB Version)

Deal  dealpursue.com/...


Liked

10 years ago.

Comment 

I really like the physical aspects of this drive. It retracts by clicking the end much like a click pen. But a drive is all about speed and this one falls flat. When copying a large video file the speed starts fast, anywhere around 25-30 Mbps but slows down and finally levels out around 6 Mbps. I would not buy this item again which is a shame as I've always been a fan of the Patriot brand.—Sep '14


Disliked

8 years ago.

Comment 

Did not work in my Macbook..Waste of money!—Sep '14


Poor

12 years ago.

Review  www.userbenchmark.com/...

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