Patriot Xporter Magnum 64GB review
64 gigabytes, not gigibytes
Just so you know, the actual capacity of the Xporter Magnum is 59.7GB, due to the discrepancy between the decimal and binary system to define the size of a hard drive. Most HDD and flash drive makers define 1 marketing gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 (109), while your computer uses the binary system and defines 1,073,741,824 bytes (230) as one gigabyte.
Performance of Patriot Xporter Magnum 64GB tested
Patriot says these drives offer 210x, which should be around 33MB/s if I'm not mistaken. To test the performance of the drive I'll use two tools: HD Tach and ATTO Disk Benchmark.
HD Tach Benchmark
First up is the HD Tach long benchmark, this tool benches various parts of the drive and provides information about the burst read speed, average read speed, and random access time. The performance seen in this benchmark is very good, Xporter Magnum 64GB has a burst read speed of 35MB/s, an average read speed of 33MB/s, and a random access time of 0.8ms. This is about the fastest you can get with current USB drives before you hit a bottleneck, if you desire more performance you'll have to wait for the first USB 3.0 devices.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Next, I tested the read and write performance of the Xporter Magnum in ATTO, I configured this tool to transfer 32MB of data to the flash drive in blocks from 1KB to 1MB. This shows how fast the drive can transfer very small and somewhat larger files. As with various other flash drives I've tested in the past, the write performance is pretty bad when transferring very small files (1-2KB) to the drive. Once you're over 16KB it starts picking up pretty fast, and with files of more than 128KB you can expect write speeds of around 18.58MB/s and read speeds of 31.43MB/s. The read performance is a bit faster than the 32GB Kingston DT150 I tested a couple of months ago, while the write speed is slightly slower. Overall the performance looks very good.
Conclusion
If you're looking for a small portable storage device that easily fits into your pocket but stills offers a massive amount of storage capacity the Patriot Xporter Magnum is exactly what you're looking for. This drive offers 64GB of storage capacity and features good read and write speeds.
The price of this product varies from shop to shop, the cheapest I could find it was at ZipZoomfly for $113.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate. The price per gigabyte of flash drives is still pretty high compared to external hard disk drives, but the price is coming down fast. About 1.5 years ago you would have paid roughly the same amount of money for a drive with a capacity of 8GB. If the price doesn't hold you back, I definitely recommend this flash drive.
The Good Stuff
The Bad Stuff
I award the Patriot Xporter Magnum 64GB with a 9/10 and our Editor's Choice award.
Previous Page (1/2)Added: February 23rd 2009
Product reviewed: Patriot Xporter Magnum 64GB
Reviewer: Thomas De Maesschalck
Score: 9/10
Page: 2/2
