Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Review

Testing Round 3 – Realworld Testing

For our “Real World” testing we use one of the most common operations performed on a PC: moving and/or copying
files from one directory to another. Using a free application called Teracopy, I copied an album of Music, coming in at roughly 500MB, from my hard drive to the Patriot flash drive. I periodically checked the results and used the lowest point in speed.
Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and thus the speed. Copying from the main hard drive to the flash drive simulates what someone would do in real life. The
operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes
simultaneously.

As we can see, the lowest point on this test was 23MB/s, which is well within the advertised range of this drive (between 20MB/s writes and 25MB/s reads). This is a sequential operation, which is what most operations with a storage drive will be. Sequential operations will almost always give you the fastest speeds as well, which is great for storage devices.

For our second test we have some great consistency from this drive; with 21MB/s on a 12GB movie file that’s an H.264 video encoded & FLAC Audio encoded with X264. Our low point this time was hit around 50% and stayed there for the rest of the transfer.

The last bit of testing is done using the Portable Apps Suite, which is a flash drive oriented suite of applications meant to give you plenty of options for software, even when you’re not on your own machine. This is specifically handy for those of you that go to your public library or school library to do various work.

Below is a chart for the startup time in seconds from the first click till the application is fully loaded and useable. Each number is rounded, and the test itself is repeated 5 times and averaged together.

	Startup Time (In seconds)
Firefox	19 Seconds
Chrome	20 Seconds
Opera	20 Seconds
Thunderbird	21 Seconds
Songbird	22 Seconds
Gimp	45 Seconds
Abiword	26 Seconds

As we can see, on average things are taking 20-25 seconds to load, which shows that this flash drive can easily be used for productivity like any normal desktop with these portable applications. Gimp had an extended load time, but like Photoshop & Paint.net on the computer it has many pieces that need to load which is why it takes more time. That’s normal and still a good loading time.

Now, I did say that I would address the idea of the random writes and reads looking slow in the synthetic testing and the best way to do that is to just move a large collection of picture files; in this case 200 photos onto the flash drive and then just use the trusty stop watch to see how long it takes to open the folder.
In this case, the 200 photos ranging in size from 200KB to 4MB opened up in a matter of 5 seconds. This drive will be fast enough for just about anyone.

Let’s wrap this up and move onto the conclusions.