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Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive review

One of the many things I’ve used my phone for the past few years is to store and move massive amounts of data from work to home. This was done in conjunction with a Patriot 64GB drive I’d accidentally run over once, washed and dried multiple times by accident, and was rather pleased with other than the speed.

Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GBTwo and a half weeks ago that ended as the amount of backup data required to be moved exceeded my abilities to carry on my phone and the old Patriot reached 110GB, so we purchased a more modern day replacement with the Supersonic Boost XT, which claimed speeds up to 150MB per second.

The speed was mostly what I was interested in. I wished I’d paid a little bit closer attention as that was exclusively read speed and write is what my biggest hold up is in moving data. Oh well.

I was about to write a scathing review of the product from initial testing, but found out some strange performance improvements that I would not have expected and still am not quite sure about.

Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GB FAT32As the product worked out of the box plugged into a USB 3.0 port I was getting read speeds at 32Mbps and writes at 17 using Crystal Disk Mark. It took two hours for me to load up 228GB onto the stick at an average write rate of 31Mbps, which was better than CDM was claiming but still pretty meh on reading.

I noticed the drive was formatted FAT32 so I decided to change it to exFAT. Immediately I saw a jump to 90Mbps and 22.68Mbps listed on disk writes. Everything seemed to be performing better, but 90MB a second was still a far cry from 150.

I reformatted to NTFS and tried again. It jumped up to 114.8 per second read, and 39.25 on writes.

Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GB EXFAT

On other tests involving small amounts of data I was able to get closer to the 150MB theoretical read speeds (136.2), but generally am settling for 110 read and 39 write and pretty happy with the stick formatted in NTFS.

Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GB NTFS

Judging by the Amazon reviews people are or were having issues with the case separating from the stick necessitating super glue. I haven’t had this happen yet, but I did with the 64 gig metal model after perhaps the third time I found it in the dryer.

Overall from what I can tell it performs up to 90% as well as the theoretical maximum read performance. I’m not sure why NTFS works so much better over exFAT, which was designed for these types of drives, but it appears to enjoy massive performance improvements using an older file system. Your computer and performance may vary wildly.

The Patriot Supersonic Boost XT 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive is available from Amazon for $99.99.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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