Patriot Supersonic Bolt XT 64GB Secure USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

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As we all know, there is certainly no shortage of USB 3.0 flash drives on the market. While most of what you will find on the market are your standard solutions, we do have a few from time to time come through the lab that offer extra features.

The Supersonic Bolt XT is the latest solution from Patriot Memory in the flash drive market. This solution offers several capacity options including 16, 32 and 64GB. Setting this drive apart from many solutions on the market today is the security, where we have 256-bit AES hardware based encryption that has this drive FIPS 197 compliant.

Marketing has this drive capable of 150 MB/s reads and 30 MB/s writes, while compatibility is listed with modern Windows operating systems, along with OS X and Linux Kernel 2.4+. MSRP of the Patriot Supersonic Bolt XT in the 64GB flavour is listed at $129.99 with a five-year warranty.

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The Bolt XT is an aesthetically pleasing solution. On the front of the drive, we have the Bolt XT raised up in sort of 3D design, while capacity is listed to the right in small print.

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The port of the Patriot Bolt XT is USB 3.0 and appropriately colored blue.

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To enable to hardware-based encryption, we first must load up the Patriot Vault software. After it's loaded and a password is set, you have the option to unlock or lock the drive.

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Here we have the password entry for unlocking our drive.

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Above, we have the results of our sequential testing. As you can see, the Bolt XT was able to reach 150 MB/s read and 50.1 MB/s write.

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Over to our new DiskBench testing, the Bolt XT was able to reach 47 MB/s with MKV and 36 MB/s with JPG.

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Price/Performance for the Patriot SS Phoenix came in at 83%, just behind the JetFlash 760 from Transcend.

The Bolt XT from Patriot is a great little drive for those wanting a secure solution. Adding to that, the build quality of this solution is quite good, and the rubberized exterior adds to that with a bit more durability than our standard solutions. While capacity options for this line-up are quite slim and limited to 64GB, this should be enough for those with small documents they want to transport securely.

Performance of this drive was decent, of course not what we are used to with USB 3.0 drives, and by no means did we expect this solution to be the highest performing solution. In our testing, we were able to reach 150 MB/s read, on par with marketing, while write speed came in above marketing at 50 MB/s.

PRICING: You can find the Supersonic Bolt XT 64GB High Performance USB 3.0 Flash Drive with Built-in Hardware-Based 256-Bit AES Data Security for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The Supersonic Bolt XT 64GB High Performance USB 3.0 Flash Drive with Built-in Hardware-Based 256-Bit AES Data Security retails for $89.99 at Amazon.

Canada: The Supersonic Bolt XT 64GB High Performance USB 3.0 Flash Drive with Built-in Hardware-Based 256-Bit AES Data Security retails for CDN$177.07 at Amazon Canada.

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