We had a chance to play with what seems to be the largest USB stick to date and we were shocked to learn that this small device was quite fast.

Most people are not even aware that a 32GB USB key exists and the one we tested from Patriot is selling since December 2007. The 32GB is shock and water resistant and we also like its rubber square shaped body. This is so far the fastest and biggest USB flash device that fits in your pocket and stores a lot of data.



It drastically dropped in price and currently it can be purchased for about $129.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate. We tried to test it on a notebook under Vista and we saw some nice scores. Scores will depend on the chipset but this is not something unusual, as some chipsets will drive USB faster.



We did some practical tests and it took us about 7 minutes to copy the 10 GB of our music collection. This is simply a great score and this device will serve you as a backup device; and it will fit in your pocket. It has a copy speed of 8.75MB/s and we noticed that on a desktop machine it could achieve even faster than 10MB/s average speed. On a G965 based notebook it took iabout 80 seconds to copy the whole 700MB, which is the usual size for an AVI file.



The Vista is a bit funny with USB devices such as this one, as it takes almost 10 seconds to do some calculations before it starts copying. Windows XP managed to do this almost instantly and it would start copying in next to no time. Under XP the same AVI file took much less to copy, but we can simply blame Vista for that. Let’s hope that Service pack 1 will fix it.

Conclusion

For such a price it looks like an ultimate storage device. It is more expensive than a 2.5-inch drive and has less capacity, but you can wash it and throw it and you won’t lose your date. A 2.5 inch drive doesn’t really fit in your pocket while the Patriot 32GB does. If you are really an enthusiast you can never get enough storage, especially portable storage. The eternal question remains whether or not you actually need 1a 6GB or 32GB USB key, but at these prices this is something that many might consider.



It is significantly faster than an old Corsair 16GB stick that on average had 5MB/s write speed, while the Patriot under XP has 9.3 to 10MB/s. We didn’t expect it to be that fast and Patriot will copy the stuff two times faster than the previous king size we had a chance to test from Corsair. The new Corsair 16GB keys are faster and Corsair also dares to go for 32GB devices. There are some people out there who want them, but probably most of the people will be happy with 4GB or 8GB.

We can certainly highly recommend the Patriot 32GB drive as it is fast, nicely designed, shock and water-resistant and with incredible storage capacity of 32GB.