Performance

USB 3.0

Considering the bold statements from Patriot I was eager to see how the drive actually performs. The company mentions 100 MB/s read and 70 MB/s write performance. Well the Supersonic bests both these numbers: 130.6 MB/s read and 83.6 MB/s write performance make this an excellent and incredibly fast drive. On top of that the performance line is completely straight with no major spikes or drops across the flash memory. This means you can expect to see constant performance no matter how full the flash drive will get.


ATTO shows a very similar image. The drive starts maxing out with 64 KB or larger files. So you should experience the full speed during normal operation unless all you do is moving small files back and forth.


As you can see, the Patriot drive is only beat in terms of read performance by the Mach Xtreme FX flash drive. I am not considering the performance of the GX series as a valid counterpart as this result requires the use of special turbo software. In terms of write speed however, the Supersonic beats them all.

USB 2.0

So what about USB 2.0? Well, here it does not get any better really. The Patriot Supersonic maxes out the interface being the second fastest drive at USB 2.0 which we have ever reviewed. The same goes for the write performance. With over 30 MB/s the Supersonic offers the fastest USB 2.0 write performance we have ever seen on a flash drive.


Interestingly enough, ATTO once more shows a slightly slower write performance, just as it did in USB 3.0, while read performance equals the results from HD Tach RW.