I recently picked up a Patriot Xporter XT Boost 16 GB (PEF16GUSB) flash drive from TigerDirect because I was outgrowing my current USB storage space. In lieu of buying a portable hard drive, I figured I would go the cheaper route and pick up another flash drive. With performance being an important factor in selecting a drive I shopped around until I found one that looked good on paper. Now that I have it in my hands, I can do some real testing to see if this drive is as good as they say it is.

For comparison’s sake, I am pitting this new drive against my “old” SanDisk Cruzer Micro 4 GB drive – I have no expectations that my Cruzer will be even close to matching the performance of the Xporter, I just want to see how much bang I got for my buck.

To test the drives, I used a trio of synthetic benchmark applications as well as a couple of “real world” tests of my own. Let’s start with the synthetic benchmarks:

I first used HDTach to gauge the performance of the Patriot drive, which scored an impressive 31.8 MB/s average sequential read speed. The Cruzer’s speed ratings under HDTach were quite a bit less impressive at 18.8 MB/s. Hey, that’s nearly a 70% improvement already!

Since not all hard drive benchmarking tools are created equal, I tested both drives using HD Tune as well. The results came in a lot closer this time, with the Patriot weighing in at an average 19.9 MB/s and the Cruzer not far behind with an average 14.7 MB/s. A 35% speedup is nothing to scoff at, but I did notice that the random access time for the Patriot drive came in at three times that of the Cruzer. I attribute that result to the fact that the drive is four times larger, however the CPU usage of the Patriot is more than double the 25% utilization figure of the Cruzer. I am not too impressed with the last two figures, but I will reserve my judgment until after I try some real-world tests.

The final application I used was Passmark’s Performance Test. Here, I was able to get discrete read and write data that was pretty much in line with the HD Tune results. The Patriot scored an average of 15.7 MB/s sequential read rate, while the Cruzer was rated at 12.4 MB/s. The write test results were a lot closer at 4.08 MB/s and 3.74 MB/s for the Patriot and Cruzer, respectively. While the 27% read performance boost and the 9% write performance boost are still pretty reasonable, they are a far cry from the 70% reading performance increase indicated by HDTach.

I figured it was time to see what these drives could do in typical usage scenarios in order to settle the performance figures once and for all.

I decided to test two different types of file transfers to get the best idea as to how these drives perform. The first test consisted of copying a 1.28 GB file to and from each drive, recording how much time was required for each transfer.

In my second test, I wanted to simulate a bulk file transfer consisting of many small/medium sized files and directories. I transferred many files and folders weighing in at 1.05 GB to and from each drive, while also recording how much time was required to delete all of the files from each.

In the large file write test, I was able to write 1.28 GB to the Patriot Xporter in 2 minutes, 21 seconds. The same task took merely 36 seconds longer with the Cruzer – however the difference in write speeds calculates out at 1.89 MB/s, or a 25% performance boost, which is not too shabby.

The large file reading test gave the Patriot Xporter a real chance to shine. Reading the same 1.28 GB file from the drive took only 48 seconds, while the Cruzer spent 1 minute, 12 seconds transferring the file. While there is only a 24 second difference in the time spent on the transfer, the Xporter had an average throughput of 27.3 MB/s, while the Cruzer lagged behind at 18.2 MB/s. For those of you keeping track at home, that is a 9.1 MB/s difference in speed, or a 50% increase in performance!

While moving a single file back and forth is a decent indicator of performance, a drive – flash or otherwise, really gets taken to task when moving many small files. Since I will be using this drive to back up my documents and other data, I picked 7,326 files and folders from my document archive to use in the following test. While the total amount of data is almost a quarter of a gigabyte smaller than the file used in the first test, I was pretty sure I would see some interesting numbers this time around.

It took 7 minutes and 4 seconds to initially copy all of the files to the Patriot Xporter, while it took 8 minutes and 13 seconds for the Cruzer to copy the files. The overall write speed for the two drives was 2.54 MB/s and 2.18 MB/s respectively. This time around, the Patriot only provided a 16.5% performance increase over the SanDisk drive.

I proceeded to copy the same group of files from each drive back to my computer, which took just under two minutes for the Xporter and just under three minutes for the Cruzer. The overall throughput for the drives came in at 9.27 MB/s and 6.25 MB/s for the Xporter and Cruzer respectively. This time around the Xporter demonstrated a 48% performance boost over the Cruzer, which falls closely in line with the 50% read performance increase from my previous test.

The final test I threw at the drives was merely done out of curiosity – both drives were able to delete the single large file nearly instantly, as would be expected, but I wanted to see what would happen in the case of many small files. The results did not disappoint, as the Patriot Xporter took 1 minute, 12 seconds to delete the files, while the Cruzer spent a whopping 4 minutes, 33 seconds dispatching the data! The Xporter outpaced the performance of the Cruzer by more than 275% when deleting the large group of files!

To be fair, I have to mention that the Xporter is formatted as an NTFS volume, while the Cruzer is FAT32. I really have no idea what implications the formatting might have in respect to overwriting entries in the master file table/file allocation table, but I can only assume it is pretty significant since the speed difference is so drastic between the two drives. Below is a chart of the overall performance boost that the Xporter offers:

So what did I learn through all this?

The Patriot Xporter is clearly a faster, more robust drive than the Sandisk Cruzer Micro. No surprise there. I already knew this, and going into this I had no expectations that the Cruzer could keep up with my new drive. Frankly, that performance boost was half the point of buying a new flash drive.

I will say however, that I was quite surprised by how much faster this new drive is compared to a drive that is probably just about a year old. I was also surprised by the wide range of performance figures offered by the various benchmarking applications, and how none of them really captured the real-world performance of the Patriot Xporter. I will say that my real-world test results fell somewhere in the middle of the synthetic benchmarks, and that has to say something, I suppose.

All in all, I am quite happy with the purchase, and I would recommend the Patriot Xporter XT Boost line to anyone.