Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32GB

pcx · Posts: 34 Join date: 2008-01-02 Location: Kuala Lumpur

Back
in the good old days of yore, 256MB on a flash drive would have put you
in good stead with your friends as they would have commented on your
awesomeness (at least your flash drive's awesomeness). These days, with
technology coming a long way since then and crashing flash memory
prices, that same old flash drive gets easily tossed aside and MB
(megabyte) has made way for GB (gigabyte). Factor in the increased
demand for even more storage space required for high definition
multimedia files that has become somewhat the norm, and even 2GB seems
a paltry amount.

Call Me Mr. Big…

Featuring
a whopping 32GB, the Patriot Xporter XT Boost is dream come true for
those unwilling to lug around portable hard drives. Encased in a thick
rubber shell, Patriot claims the flash drive to be both shock and water
resistant. However, the black and red rubber skin makes it a dust
attractor, and the rubber surface makes it difficult to wipe off the
dust (though you can try washing it, since it claims to be water
resistant after all).

Performance wise, the Xporter XT is rated
to be able to hit up to 150x (22.5MB/s) data transfer speeds, which not
only makes it a huge drive (in terms of storage space of course), it
should be quite speedy too.

Putting
it to the test on HD Tach 3.0.4.0 revealed that Patriot was not
just tooting its own horn as we obtained constant read speed of about
31.5MB/s, meaning that in terms of read speeds, the Xporter XT was
performing 40% above the rated specs, well into the 200x range.

Write
speeds were another matter though, as we obtained average speeds of
around 6-7MB/s, making it around five times slower than the read
speeds. Expect to wait for more than 70 minutes should you wish to fill
up the 32GB drive with data.

Mightily Small

Aside
for our minor complaints about the rubber skin, the Patriot Xporter XT
is a fine piece of equipment. Without a doubt, the read speed of the
Xporter XT makes it a really handy device for sharing data with your
friends. However, its write speeds is less than optimal for its
increased capacity and will make getting the data onto the thumb drive
a pain.

The Patriot Xporter XT costs a whopping US$129
(~S$184), but we think that users will still be getting a bargain for
the price paid, seeing as how eight 4GB flash drives will cost around
US$19 (~S$27) each. While you could get an 80GB portable hard disk
drive with some change left over, the Xporter XT is still much more
portable in terms of form factor.

Product Specifications

Hi Speed USB 2.0 Compatible (backwards compatible to USB 1.1)
Up to 150X performance speed
Durable water and shock resistant housing
Certified for Microsoft Vista Readyboost
Lifetime Warranty

source: hardwarezone.com.my

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