Product Listing

First Looks: Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32GB

By Aloysius Low - 24 Jan 2008

Size Matters Not

Size Matters Not

 

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.
 

 

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