So, the Patriot Supersonic Pulse USB 3.0
USB 2.0: Writing a 1.4GB file took 135 seconds, which is a little over 10.6MB/s but still significantly slower than my old 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Titanium, which managed an average speed of almost 14MB/s.
Reading the same file back over USB 2.0 took 43 seconds: maxing out USB 2.0 as expected, with an average transfer rate of 33.5MB/s.
USB 3.0: Writing a 4.37GB file took exactly 7 minutes, so the same 10.6MB/s as on USB 2.0. Watching the transfer in resmon saw transfer spikes up to 30MB/s, then dips as the flash caught up with the writes.
Reading the same file back took exactly 60 seconds; an impressive average speed of 74.5MB/s
Copying the contents of a Windows 7 x64 DVD to create a bootable USB stick also took about 7 minutes. This totals 3.65GB but involves copying a couple of large files and a huge number of very tiny files, which often bog down cheaper flash memory and controllers. No complaints here.
So, impressive read speeds but disappointingly slow sequential writes. How much this impacts your choice depends on how you use your USB memory stick: if you have a mostly static content which you regularly copy off to a number of PCs, it's very good. If, like me, you copy new stuff to it on a regular basis and want a convenient way to move files between machines, it's not so good (although it still matches a 100mbps LAN for transfer speed).
Overall it's good -- 3x faster than the infuriatingly useless SanDisk Cruzer Blade I purchased recently, while only 2x the price -- but not great -- my three year old USB 2.0 Cruzer Titanium beats it hands down for write speed. It's shameful that a USB 3.0 device is only able to make use of the extra USB 3.0 speed in one direction, however I suspect that to see >30MB/s writes you'd have to pay considerably more for a premium memory stick. As the read speed is genuinely impressive and the price premium over a similar USB 2.0 drive is minimal, the Patriot Supersonic still offers decent value. On the whole I would still recommend it.
