11. Patriot Xporter Magnum Flash Drive (128 GB)

Patriot Xporter Magnum Flash Drive (128 GB)

A 128 GB flash drive that’s smaller than a pack of gum? Five or six years ago, this would have sounded ludicrous, but with HD content now the norm for technophiles, who wouldn’t want that much storage attached to a keychain? Well, maybe not your keychain as the Patriot Xporter Magnum series is definitely small, but still rather beefy by thumb drive standards. But at 1.05”x2.83”x0.35” and 0.69 oz., it will certainly fit in your pocket, laptop sleeve, or purse.

Like nearly every other flash drive on the market, the Magnum comes formatted in the FAT32 storage standard. This format works well for music, pictures, and documents, but the 4 GB file size limit doesn’t cut the mustard for HD content. Once you dive into Windows Disk Management and format the Magnum into NTFS, you’ll get about 121 GB of storage to play around with and no file-size restrictions. That’s enough space for about a dozen Full HD movies (in .mkv format) or roughly 28,000 MP3s.

One of the Magnum’s best features is that the drive doesn’t sacrifice speed for size. The “Ultra High” 210x read speed is no joke—we put the drive through its paces with audio (A Slayer album in FLAC format), video ("Top Gun" in a 720p .mkv format), and images (a few hundred vacation JPEG files), and the Magnum posted blistering read speeds of 31.21, 30.26 and 25.75 MB/s, respectively. The write speeds for the audio and video were slower, but still respectable at 14.57 MB/s and 15.13 MB/s. Only with images did the Magnum’s write speed drop sharply, to about 4.29 MB/s.

The only two drawbacks to the Magnum series are price and physical size. The 128 GB Magnum sells for around $350, so you won’t gift it as a stocking stuffer unless you’re Donald Trump. However, it’s hard to knock Patriot on the price—this is an incredible amount of flash storage for your money. Also, the price is middle-of-the-road for flash drives of this capacity (they go from $300 to $400).

Here’s where the size comes into play: both the 64 and 128 GB versions of the Magnum are a tad wide. This can cause problems if you’re connecting the Magnum to a laptop where two USB ports are side-by-side. Chances are the Magnum will block part of the port to its left or right, rendering that port useless. To be fair to Patriot, the company did include a small female-to-male USB cable so you can use the Magnum drive at a short distance from your laptop, without causing any accessibility problems to other ports.

If blistering speed and huge capacity aren’t enticing enough reasons to think the 128 GB Magnum would make a great gift, there’s another perk: it comes with a code to unlock a free copy of Street Fighter IV at the online gaming site Steam. The game is one of the most popular titles of the year and the PC version goes for $40, so consider it a stocking stuffer for you from Patriot. --Devin Connors

(The other USB drive in this picture will be featured in an upcoming gift guide.)