Reviewing Biggest USB Flash Memory: 32GB

I couldn't help it, I needed one; Actually I don't. But I just wanted to have it, 32Gb, these days for a usb stick is simply crazy. In six months it will be normal seing them at stores, and in less than a year, they will be cheap.



This fast, 150x speed stick. After testing it, it threw out 30Mb/s reading and, 8Mb/s writing speed. I have to do more writing tests, because 8mb/s despite good, feels strange compared to those amazingly fast sustained 30 reading.
*Updated: Today I made a simple but reliable writing test: I copied 30Gb of HD movies (files over 4Gb each) and it took just over an hour. This means, it has an average writing speed of 8Mb/s. If we think about the hour it takes to fill the sticks, it is dead slow, but, compared to other average usb sticks, it is a lot quicker.



And if having 32gb in a usb stick, means I don't need to take an external hard drive with my laptop all the time, I still think is great! Since this stick is really big, I formated it with NTFS rather than FAT32 for better use of drive's capacity as well as being able to write files bigger than 4Gb.
I also did the test the other way around: Copying the same files from the usb stick to a very fast drive (2xSATA drives on RAID 0 through firewire) to check the reading speed. This test was a bit disapointing, with only 24,14Mb/s average speed and under the higher 30Mb/s measured earlier. Compared to writing speed, it is actually 3 times faster reading than writing.*
With this 30Mb/s reading speed I want to put Linux inside and see how the PC feels, but since my notebook refuses to boot from a usb stick, I'll have to wait for another oportunity.
This stick is enhaced for Vista ReadyBoost but seriously, it only means it is not dead slow since all the relatively new but cheap sticks I tried could do the job.



About the usb stick, it is rather uncommon, its cover is made of soft rubber instead of common plastic. This gives a nicer feeling, and according to manufacturer it is water and shock resistant, but since this thing is a little expensive, we are not going to check those.
Size is almost average, it is thicker, but I rather think it is about the rubber cover, more than bigger because of its capacity.
As you can see on the pictures is almost the same size as a normal 4gb stick.




Usually usb sticks come in a blister as small as the stick, with some space to put the features and that's all. But here, we are talking about other stuff bundled: Indeed it comes with a usb extender cable -handy for computers under the desk- and a lanyard -really cheap and lame one-; I rather have no lanyard since it is poor quality.

Patriot Memory also qualified this usb flash memory with lifetime warranty, so probably those 32gb are safe in there.

To sum up, this Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32gb usb flash memory is huge at 32Gb, it is not the fastest usb stick ever seen by mankind but close and it is not too expensive considering it is very rare.
It is a safe purchase if you need, or better said want, a 32Gb usb stick.
More info about it here.