So does size or speed matter? When it comes to USB drives I mean of course! USB Drives are getting larger and larger in capacity, it’s to the point where you can carry the capacity of several DVDs on one of them. With that capacity increase though the speed usually suffers, at least in the first generation of products that come out, at least that’s from what I’ve seen in my experiences anyway.

Today for review I’ve got a 64gb USB drive, the Patriot Xporter Magnum. There’s no doubt it’s got a lot of storage space, but the question of course is how fast is it compared to other drives? And, well I really can’t answer that question though because I have no other 64gb drives to compare it to, but I do have a whole bunch of others on hand for comparison, so I’ll do my best to show you how it compares to them.

So read on to learn more about the Xporter…

No video today, it’s just a USB drive, I think that’s a bit too small to do a video of. The Xporter comes in the dreaded sealed plastic clamshell package.

With it you get a short USB extension cable and a lanyard:

The Patriot Xporter Magnum is a metal housed drive so it should be able to withstand a bit of abuse, the cap does come off though and it’s not attached to anything so there is the possibility of losing it.<

Specifications:

Patriot 64GB Xporter Magnum USB Flash Drive

PEF64GMNUSB

The Patriot Extreme Performance Xporter Magnum USB drive is the perfect solution to transport your important data wherever you go. Optimized for fast transfer rates, the Magnum offers an ultra-fast 210x read speed; the fastest in the market. Magnum also boasts Microsoft’s  certification, Certified for Windows Vista. The certification guarantees maximum compatibility, including Vista’s Readyboost feature. With the Patriot Exporter Magnum USB drive, users can transport their data with ease

Features
* Hi Speed USB 2.0 Compatible (backwards compatible to USB 1.1)
* Easy plug and play functionality
* Portable and lightweight (19.5 grams)
* Driverless in Windows ME/2K/XP/Vista, Mac OS 9.x, OS X Linux with USB storage support
* Certified for Windows Vista
* Lifetime Warranty

Before we get into testing here’s a comparison shot of the Xporter with a few other drives to give you an idea of size:

As you can see it’s about the same size as the others, a bit fatter, but I’d say average compared to the ‘standard’ sized drives.

So for testing I put the Xporter up against the drive you saw in the picture above, they’re 4gb and 8gb drives. I used SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage Benchmark and I used DiskBench as well for testing.

First up is SiSoft Sandra:

(high is better for both)

As you can see according to these tests the Xporter isn’t that great of a performer, but here’s a closer look at the 256MB files test of the Removable Storage benchmark:

Here we can see things are a bit more even, sort of, at least for read performance.

Next up I’ve got DiskBench. This program will tell us in actual seconds how long it takes to do something, in this case I’m using a 350MB .AVI Video file for the testing. In the following graph you’ll see the time it takes to Copy From, Copy To and Read From the USB Drives.

Obviously lower times are better.

Here we can see again they’re fairly evenly matched except for that Copy To time where it goes a bit higher than the OCZ and Lexar drives, still though performance is not bad at all.

Here’s the actual transfer rates for the test, higher is better of course.

Conclusion:
The Patriot Xporter Magnum 64gb USB drive is a nicely made product that seems durable and should last for quite some time and it’s got some good speeds overall.

If I had a choice between the large capacity or the higher speed, I’d happily choose the larger capacity any day.

If you’re looking for a large capacity USB drive then I’d definitely give this one a look as it’s well made and it’s got some decent speeds.

Pros:
Fairly fast
Large capacity
Very well made

Cons:
Not the fastest in some areas of transfer

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance