Introduction

Patriot has over 25 years of experience in the field of DRAM and flash memory. Being headquartered in the United States they promise leading quality without compromise for quality. The company turned quite a few heads with their Magnum series of USB 2.0 flash drives and Patriot is aiming to continue the tradition with the new USB 3.0 interface standard.


Patriot has sent us one of their USB 3.0 flash drives today. The unit is appropriately called Supersonic and is available in 32 and 64 Gigabyte variants.

Features:

• USB 3.0 compliant
• Quad-Channel technology for fast read/write performance
• Up to 100 MB/s read*
• Up to 70 MB/s write*
• Backwards compatible with USB 2.0
• Aluminum housing for shock resistance up to 15G

Packaging

Patriot packages the drive in a cardboard sandwich. It consists of two thick pieces of cardboard which are glued together, holding the plastic bold and the device in place. The brand, model name, along with the capacity can be found on the front, while the rear goes into greater detail. Patriot mentions the same specifications as on their website here as well. It will be interesting to see if the drive can deliver on this promise.

A Closer Look

Taking a quick look, the Supersonic is actually rather compact. The casing is made of metal and plastic, so it should be able to take quite a beating. One side holds the Patriot logo, while the Supersonic model name has been printed on the other side of the housing.


Doing our usual size comparison to a standard optical disc, it can be said, that the Supersonic is of the same size as traditional USB 2.0 flash drives. The sleek Mach Xtreme GX unit is just as thin, but much longer than the Patriot Supersonic for example.


A little hole in the rear end of the housing allows you to attach the drive to your key chain if you wish. You will have to supply the appropriate parts to do so yourself, as Patriot does not ship any extras with this stick. The capacity of the flash drive has also been printed on the rear of the drive.


A simple cap protects the USB 3.0 connector from damage in your Jeans pocket. It attaches to the drive with a noticeable clipping sound, so you should not end up loosing it under normal circumstances. The USB 3.0 connector is just as you would expect it, with the blue interior. A serial number seems to be laser etched into the surface.