Performance
As it was mentioned at the beginning of this review, we will be testing the Patriot Stellar Boost XT 64GB flash drive on the Intel Haswell platform based on Core i7 4790K processor and ASUS Maximus VII Gene motherboard. For all tests we will be using the Intel USB 3.0 controller so about the same results should be possible to achieve on any modern Intel based platform as the USB controller is built in the chipset.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark is one of the most popular storage benchmarks so we also use it so you could easier compare hardware results at home.
Referring back to our specification page, we already know that Patriot is declaring that the Stellar Boost XT should run a bandwidth of 110MB/s read and 20MB/s write.
As we see above, ATTO results are way above declared speed. Maximum transfers were 132MB/s read and nearly 62MB/s write. That’s just great comparing to declared values! To be sure, I had to rerun the same tests on the second USB controller on the motherboard which was manufactured by AS Media. Both results were pretty close to each other so I am sure that it was not a benchmark error.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64
CrystalDiskMark is also showing higher results; however the write bandwidth is below 20MB/s. The flash drive performance is mainly based on sequential read transfers. Here we can expect up to 127MB/s which is also a really good result.
CrystalDiskMark has also set of random bandwidth tests. Random 4K read results are pretty good while random write does not look as good. As I already said, the write and especially random write is not important for USB flash drive products; but we still wish to see higher numbers here.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
The last test in our benchmark suite will be Anvil’s Storage Utilities. The tests are similar to the two previous benchmarks but are prepared on a different size of files.
Also here we see the read bandwidth which is above our expectations reaching 119MB/s. Also again we can see really low random write results. During daily work we will not really see it as everything on a modern system is cached but it is still worth to mention.
The Patriot Stellar Boost XT 64GB performed really well. In the tests that are important, so everything based on data read, the results are great. The sequential write results are also good, especially in the ATTO Disk Benchmark. However it is hard not to mention about the really low random write results. During general work with this flash drive I have not noticed any performance drops so I will not consider random write as a big disadvantage of this product.
