Thanks heaps for going to the trouble to try to get the drive again. I hope it works out.

I found some old numbers that showed 36/2 on the older Gen 1 Patriot Magnums. If this newer drive can do 40/20 (or better) then that would be a significant improvement indeed.

Obviously 40/20 doesn’t grab headlines, but folks should try to understand that throwing 4K files at any drive is like asking the drive to chip away at bomb-shelter concrete… it’s hard work.

Any thumbdrive that can do it smoothly and allow your workflow to stay productive is exceptional. Hopefully that will be the case with this newer Patriot Supersonic Magnum2 model.

In comparing this to Gen 1, our tests were conducted with 0Fill whereas here they are not. This show a marked improvement in this fact alone, however, looking at the 4K results I recall 43/29 which is significantly better than last Gen regardless. We are trying to get our hands on the drive again for further testing.

Plenty of folks are using these on a daily basis with small files (sometimes even as primary storage). So with these new Gen 2 drives, it would be interesting to know if Patriot has managed to keep (or improve upon) the previous good performance of the Gen 1 drives. Especially with small files.

The Gen2 increase to 512GB will be welcome as long as they can maintain performance and reliability. Just look at the disastrous reliability that some folks have experienced when trying to upgrade from Gen 1 Patriot Supersonic Magnum thumbdrives (256GB and below) to the 512GB Corsair Flash Voyager GS.

Users experienced some DOAs and premature deaths on those Corsairs. Also, performance was noticeably laggy on the Corsair 512GB.

Lets hope Patriot managed to keep it right (and not regress) on this 512GB product.

As for the assertion that big thumb drives are primarily used for very large files, I’m not so sure. I think most people use them with files sets that include a wide variety of files sizes.

One practical way to test usability is to see if there are noticeable delays when opening various files types. For three years, I’ve used the Gen 1 drives as primary storage, travel backups, and giveaways to family (I currently have a dozen, evenly split between the 256GB capacity version and smaller versions). They let you open large spreadsheets in less than a second. With the Gen 1 drives you can navigate, enter data, copy, paste, etc., with very little delay.

Another practical way to test is to see how they handle copy operations. With the Gen 1 drives, file and folder creation and copy times are acceptable, though not nearly as good as an internal SSD.

Low quality thumbdrives on the other hand, will quickly gouge chunks of time out of your daily productivity workflow. They feel like quicksand has invaded your drive.

So which is it… are these usable for daily workflow?

Or just draggy dogs?

Much like we saw with Thunderbolt, I believe there will be a hardware transition period where manufacturers will still rely on USB 3.1 Gen 1 for affordability. Once we see type C connectors become commonplace, so will the faster speeds. Just my 2 cents.