14 DAY TRIAL // The flash drive market is a particularly lucrative one, because it's one where branding matters far less than in other parts of the IT industry. There are still some companies that have made a name for themselves though, like Patriot. Patriot, which has just launched a couple of new collections.
Clearly, the company felt that a single flash drive or two was not going to be enough of a product “refresh” or whatever it's called this month.
So Patriot set about releasing a total of eight new USB flash drive units, divided into two distinct product lines.
A set of four drives (8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB) is called Stellar Lite, while the other one bears the name of Stellar Boost XT (16 GB, 32 GB and 63 GB).
The former series benefits from a light and tough aluminum housing (1 gram weight), and a performance of 30 MB/s read, up to 15 MBs write.
The line is also compatible with Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Linux 2.4 and later, and Mac OS9, X and later.
That's in addition to the Android 4.0 (and later) mobile operating system that comes naturally to an OTG flash drive.
In case you don't know what OTG means, it's an acronym for On-the-Go and defines flash drives that have a micro-USB that can be used to “recognize” smartphones as host PCs, in a manner of speaking.
As you may have guessed, both the Stellar Lite and Stellar Boost XT have two USB ports each, a normal one and a Micro USB one. Both feature USB 2.0 technology.
Which brings us to the second product collection, Stellar Boost XT, which is partly similar to the Stellar Lite, insofar as OS support is concerned.
The Stellar Boost XT have rugged casings though (rubber housing, 8 grams weight), as well as up to 110 MB/s read speed, plus up to 10 MB/s write speed. It's a pretty bizarre performance to be frank. It’s supposed to be USB 3.0 (which is something pretty rare, if not unheard of, for micro-USB ports, much less dual-port OTG flash drives), but the write speed is painfully low.
Maybe it was a typo and the real rate was supposed to be 100, but it's unlikely. When it comes to flash drives, the type and number of flash chips has a greater bearing on performance than the interface bandwidth.
Anyway, the Stellar Lite will ship this month for $10 / €10 to $40 / €40, while the Stellar Boost XT have tags of $13 / €13 to $50 / €50.
