Need a big, fast USB Stick and would like to not pay very much for it? I got you
The Patriot Supersonic Rage Pro sounds like a missile, and will store and transfer files just as devastatingly.
Like me, your home probably has at least one drawer for storing 'bits'. It will be filled with pens, half-finished tubes of glue, many rubber bands, some unused greetings cards, random receipts, and half a dozen cheap USB sticks. In my case, the sticks are mostly promotional ones, rarely more than a couple of GB in size, containing ancient screenshots and press releases. Which is annoying because, despite the rise of cloud storage for pretty much everything, having at least one large ol' faithful data drive feels essential for the modern gamer about town. And by about town I mean still very much stuck indoors.
Enter the Patriot Supersonic Rage Pro 128GB high-performance flash drive, which from hereon we shall call Patty. This is a USB 3.2 Gen 1 drive which claims to deliver 420MB/s sequential read performance. As Paul Lilly noted when the range was launched in May, that's close to SATA SSD speeds. Right now, the 128GB variant is $24.99 on Amazon, a $17.00 saving on the list price, and the lowest it's been on that site by some distance. There are (much) smaller savings to be had on the larger models, which come in 256GB and 512GB flavors.
Patriot Supersonic Rage Pro | USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive | 128GB | $41.99 $24.99 at Amazon (save $17)
The latest Patriot comes with aluminium coating to help heat dispersion and a 5-year warranty in case you lose your priceless collection of brass rubbing jpegs. Otherwise, it's a really fast USB stick. That's the deal.
Why, pray tell, do I need a USB stick in the year of our lord 2021? Well, for one thing I'm old, and for another I've just bought a new laptop, and I think I'd rather transfer most of the files manually—and have them backed up on Patty just in case. He shall reign forever as king of the bits drawer, or until I buy a slightly bigger stick a decade later.
For our full rundown of the best flash drives, head to this guide, and for complete Black Friday coverage of all the deals so far, check out the Black Friday deals hub.