Patriot Supersonic Rage Prime USB 3.2 Gen2 1TB Flash Drive Review

TweakTown's Rating: 89%

The Bottom Line

While being a little pricey at 1TB, the SS Rage Prime delivers fantastic read performance and legit sustained writes.

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It has been years since we last had a flash drive come through for testing, but when the PR for this drive came through my inbox, I saw the capacity options and sent out a request. Years ago, the Supersonic Rage 2 and Magnum 2 sat at the top of our flash drive charts and still do; though the market has calmed and mainly switched to portable SSDs for external storage, there are still some use cases where flash drives thrive.

The latest from Patriot is this Supersonic Rage Prime; it is offered in capacities that include 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. Performance is rated up to 600 MB/s using a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface and USB-A connection.

Pricing lands at $49.99 for the 250GB, $74.99 for the 500GB, and $164.99 on the 1TB. All drives have a five-year warranty.

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Packaging is quite typical for flash drives, bubble packaging with capacity top right and branding to the left.

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The back offers specifications of the flash drive, including compatibility and warranty information.

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The drive itself is a capless design, very similar to the Rage 2 from years ago.

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The end of the drive houses the USB-A connection, colored blue to denote USB 3.2.

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Powering up the drive, we have a usable capacity of 931 GB. It comes factory formatted with exFAT for Windows and macOS compatibility.

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Running the drive-through CDM, we do get 613 MB/s read and 547 MB/s to write. 4KQ1 reaches 42 MB/s reads, and 146 MB/s write.

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Last, I ran the drive through our sustained write testing to see how it would handle the heat load and if any performance was lost. Amazingly the Rage Prime did really well with an average of 667 MB/s write speed.

Wrapping this up, the Rage Prime is a really well-built drive leaning on proven components with a Phison PS2251-17 controller, a controller that's typically designed for portable SSDs. This allows the drive to hit its 600 MB/s performance target and sustained write in our testing.

On the flip side, the Rage Prime is priced like an external SSD as well at $164.99 for the 1TB capacity; those not needing the flash drive form factor will find it more cost-effective to throw a Gen 3 NVMe solution in a portable enclosure.

TweakTown External Storage Test System

• System: XPG Xenia Xe
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)