The Basics:

The Patriot Memory Supersonic 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive has an aluminum housing to protect the internal components, and is shock resistant up to 15G. I do like to see some sort of water proof feature on flash drives, as often it may be forgotten in a pants pocket and accidentally run through a wash cycle. In the below left image we see the Patriot Memory logo in white lettering. On the backside of the drive (shown in the below right image) we see the Supersonic logo and the drive capacity.



There are two things I think are necessary when choosing a USB flash drive; somewhere to store the removed cap and a lanyard. Unfortunately this drive has neither. In the image below I have removed the cap from the drive. You can see the blue plastic of a USB 3.0 device where it normally would be black on a USB 2.0 device.



To compare the physical size of the Patriot Memory Supersonic 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive, we see it with a Patriot Memory Xporter XT Boost 32GB drive, a Kingston DT Mini Slim 4GB drive, and a US Quarter. In the image below we see the differences between the three drives and the Quarter. The Supersonic is just about the same length as the Xporter, but it is a little narrower. In addition, the Supersonic is just about double the size of the DT Mini Slim.



Test Setup:

For the testing of the Patriot Memory Supersonic 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive, it was connected to a system running Windows 7 Professional SP1 x64 with the following components:

» ASUS P7P55D-E LX motherboard
» Intel Core i3 540 processor
» Corsair XMS 4GB DDR3 memory
» EVGA nVidia GeForce 9500GT video card
» Seagate SATA 6GB/s 640GB hard drive

For comparison purposes, it was matched up against the USB 2.0 Patriot Memory Xporter XT Boost 32GB USB flash drive. Although it is only a USB 2.0 device, it does have rather quick read speeds (exceeding 200x or 30MB/s).