The Patriot Xporter XT offers the same capacity at less than half the price of Kingston’s drive (reviewed next). Unfortunately, that’s the only stand-out feature we could find.

Like Corsair’s Flash Voyager, the Xporter XT is dreadfully slow at writing small files, but unlike the Voyager, it doesn’t make up for that weakness with especially speedy large- and medium-file transfers. The Xporter XT also can’t compare to Kingston’s offering, which too is just fair at large- and medium-size files, but crazy-fast with small files.

Don’t get us wrong, the Xporter XT is no slouch. It’s close in write performance to the OCZ Rally and the SanDisk Cruzer that we rated highly in November. But that was before the 8GB Corsair and 4GB Kingston keys arrived. And given the Xporter XT’s lack of U3 support or basic encryption utilities, we think there are better choices out there.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ FEET: Lowest cost per gigabyte on the street.
- METERS: Gets aced by the competition in performance
Verdict: 7
URL: www.patriotmem.com