Patriot is best known for memory, SD Cards, RAM, SSDs, and USB sticks. USB sticks, thumb drives, flash memory, or whatever you may call them have become a staple product for any computer user, a quick and simple way to transport your data. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of designs out there but today we have something a little less mainstream: a snowman.

The holidays may be over and it is already three weeks after new years but it does not mean that this little guy is out of style. Here at NB-C headquarters we nicknamed him Bill. Why? Well why not? Bill came to us packaged in simple clear case with waterproofed cardboard as the backdrop. It was pretty easy to open but in the end we would recommend using scissors over trying to tear it apart by hand.

Specifications

Patriot Limited Edition Holiday 8GB Snowman USB Flash Drive

Dimensions: .43” x 2.1” x .86” (D x W x H) — 110mm x530mm x 218mm
Weight: 0.02lbs — 10.6g
Materials: Rubber, Metal
External Interface: USB 2.0
Color(s): White

Supported OS: Windows ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Linux 2.4 (and later), Mac OS9 (and later)
Warranty Length: 2 Years

Price: $10-$20

Once we got Bill out of the box we began to realize that for 10$ (Average price around $15) he was a good deal. The Body is formed out of soft rubber and turned out to be smaller than we expected: about the size of two AAA batteries. The choice of material allows Patriot to provide a detailed design while maintaining durability. Besides, it works as a cushion in case the drive is sat on or dropped protecting your data.

To "open" the stick up you simply remove the bottom ball from the snowman. Quite usefully, you can hook the bottom to the attached "holder" which prevents losing the cover.

Moving on to the built-quality the stick is one of the more durable sticks that we have seen. Its rubber form keeps it protected when dropped on hard surfaces, in fact we dropped it from the fourth floor of a building and Bill did not even suffer a scratch. Moreover, the product remained functional and no data was lost. We should note that although it may appear water-proof it is not.

Performance

In some cases, such as benchmarking, the more the better, this is why we decided to benchmark the Snowman 8GB (7.45GB usable) thumb drive with three fairly standard benchmarks.

We began benchmarking the memory stick with ATTO Disk Benchmark, an older benchmarking tool that is still used due to its wide range of options. For our test we ran the benchmark with the default settings.

The writes are displayed in red while the green on the chart represents the reads. Analyzing the graph and it is pretty clear that the read values as higher than the write values. This is normal in most cases but the vast difference is not. Write speeds in this benchmark came back lower than expected in the higher range but in the lower range this stick had some punch.

The writes are displayed in red while the green on the chart represents the reads. Analyzing the graph and it is pretty clear that the read values as higher than the write values. This is normal in most cases but the vast difference is not. Write speeds in this benchmark came back lower than expected in the higher range but in the lower range this stick had some punch.

Although we will not name names we looked at reviews of higher-end memory sticks from Patriot and the Snowman (in ATTO benchmarks) proved to be faster at writing between 0.5kb and 16KB. For comparison, the Microsoft Word single page document (without images) is approximately 12KB.

Our next benchmarks were performed on Crystal Diskmark which measures sequential reads/writes, measures random 512KB, 4KB and 4KB (Queue Dept=32) reads and writes speeds. We tested speeds with 50MB, 100MB, 500MB, 1000MB and 2000MB. For your reference 105MB to 160MB is equivalent to a music album ripped at 320kbps.

As the charts show, the greater the size the higher and better the numbers become (in general). This demonstrates and affirms the consistency of the USB stick. This is normal but as for how the numbers fair against competitors the stick does ok. It is not designed to be a high performance stick and for that reason will not push read numbers upwards of 30MB/s. But considering the market this stick is aimed at, the numbers are not bad by any means.

Our final test was conducted using HDTune which showed some pretty similar numbers. Even though it appears that there was quite a bit of fluctuation in the speed, the range was limited keeping it fairly steady.

Conclusion

Products such as the Snowman USB memory stick are usually not products that end up on our review bench. We are often looking at products designed for a niche market, such as the gaming industry but it is pretty or cute tech products that people buy and unfortunately are often designed from the image out. In the case of the Patriot Snowman the durability, quality and performance say otherwise. The rubberized materials chosen adds resilience to drops, crashes and other daily obstacles while providing detailed aesthetics, which are simply plain "cute".

On the performance side of things it performed well in lighter file transfers in the ATTO benchmark while proving to pick up the pace while working with larger file sizes. It performs well for the market that it is aimed at and will serve the majority of that market well. In the end this is a unique USB memory stick that won’t break the bank or suffer in performance.

One final note, this is a limited edition stick so get your hands on it sooner rather than later.