Patriot dials up the Rage on USB flash drives, delivering near SATA SSD speeds

Patriot Supersonic Rage Pro — (Image credit: Patriot)

It's not very often that a USB flash drive warrants writing about, but Patriot's Supersonic Rage Pro is an exception. It's an even faster version of its predecessor, the Rage 2, which occupies a spot in our roundup of the best USB flash drives because of its impressive speed.

The new Rage Pro kicks things up a notch, according to its rated specifications. It's a USB 3.2 Gen 1 flash drive that purportedly delivers up to 420MB/s of sequential read performance, to go along with up to 8,000 IOPs for 4K random reads. There's no mention of write performance, though as a point of reference, the Rage 2 (later renamed Rage Elite) is rated to write at up to 300MB/s. I imagine it's similar (if not better) for the Rage Pro.

"The Rage Pro is also optimized as a boot drive for Windows OS and other operating systems, while the extra IOPS and random 4K read and write speed provides excellent reliability and faster boot times. The Rage Pro can also be an alternative solution when users need an independent rescue drive for laptops and desktops," Patriot says.

You won't find fancy features like built-in encryption, just an aluminum housing and an LED indicator. The focus here is simply on speed. Coincidentally, I recently went on the hunt for a new flash drive, and nearly pulled the trigger on the Rage 2/Elite, which is consistently recommended when performance is the top consideration.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).