Patriot Aero 1TB Wireless Hard Drive Review

Introduction Earlier in the year I had my first look at a new line of devices that over the recent months have been getting more and more popular with people on the go who need heaps of storage with them. Naturally I’m taking about wireless hard drives and when I first saw the Gauntlet way back last year at a trade show, Patriot were keen to show me what these drives had to offer, with scalability for connecting up to three devices at once and streaming content through the use of a mobile application that can be downloaded through Google Play and the Apple App Store. What really set these units apart from the likes of Kingston’s Wi-Drive was that considerably larger storage capacity – offering up to 320GB through a 2.5” hard drive. Battery life was also fairly remarkable at the time as well with around 4 hours of continuous use to be expected and seen. Moving forward to today, the Gauntlet series of wireless hard drives is now seeing its third member to the line-up. So far we have seen the Gauntlet with 320GB of storage and the Aero; a disk-less option that gives flexibility for users to install their own hard drive or even an SSD for better battery life. Let’s be honest though, 320GB doesn’t exactly seem a lot since yester-year and consequently Patriot have addressed this with the release of the Aero – a drive of the same design, but this time with a whopping 1TB capacity and improved battery life to go along with it. For those who have read my review on the Gauntlet, which can be found here: Patriot Gauntlet 320Gb Review, this review is going to feel quite de-ja-vous, but I am going to briefly touch on the design followed as expected by the performance figures to see if there is any gain in performance from the larger drive. Inside the box, we find all the required cables and a power adaptor with US, EU and UK plugs for powering and charging the drive from the mains during wireless use. A Closer Look Whilst the drive is the exact same dimensions as the Gauntlet and Node, there is only one subtle difference between the lot - namely the Aero branding on the top to differentiate this unit from the others. On the end of the drive there is full USB3.0 functionaility with a power button and DC jack included for charging the internal battery. The battery level button on the side of the drive is one of the more useful features that I have seen amongst the selection of wireless drives that I have seen to date. Test System Test system: Asus Maximus V Formula Intel Core i7 3770k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB XFX Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H100i Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: CrystalDiskMark Anvil’s Storage Utilities RC6 IOMeter ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Comparing the Aero 1TB to its smaller brother, the Gauntlet 320GB, there is a notable improvement to the performance for both the read and write speeds with gains of at least 20MB/s to be seen. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”: Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) Looking in a little deeper within CrystalDiskMark, we can see that again there is a sequential read and write performance gain of around 20MB/s whilst the 512k write speed sees a gain of around 12MB/s and the 4k write speeds also see a small gain. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a free to download benchmarking utility and has the ability to test hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Anvil's gives us a data set that follows suit with the above tests and the response times are also highly acceptable for a device of this nature. Another thing we note is that the Aero is detected as the Gauntlet Node within Anvil's as opposed to the Aero. Final Thoughts Pricing The Aero 1TB is available through most major e-tailors and is priced around £140 (~$225USD / ~€166EUR). For a drive of this nature, I would have expected a slightly higher price tag than this and with the additional features that it comes with, it's certainly worth the little extra cost over the 320GB Gauntlet which is retailing for around £30 less. Overview When I had a look at the 320GB Gauntlet a few months ago, I was very impressed with the features of the drive along with its good battery life, wireless bridge mode for internet access and the fluidity of the mobile app to go with it. The Aero whilst offering up a larger capacity, realistically speaking is not much different to the afore mentioned drive considering they both use the exact same chassis and circuitry - the only difference between the two being the Aero model name and the larger 1TB capacity that is inside. With mobile wireless storage become even more popular, both for families who want to share music and films to multiple devices whilst on the go for one example, or for the business person that wants to get to their data on the go without the need for having the laptop out as another example. Data is everything to us and for many people, the more data that they can take with them in their pocket - the better. As mentioned, the drive is certainly worth the little extra cost over the Gauntlet 320GB, although as with all things, there is always room to improve the product - such as increasing the battery life even further or even creating a smaller, more compact model - for now this is one of the better wireless hard drives to be had at this moment in time. Pros: Massive 1TB capacity Well known vendor Good battery life Simple to use Battery meter USB3.0 compatible Reasonable price Cons: Wireless app still needs some refinement for a smooth operation Chunky build "Following the success of Patriot's 320 Gauntlet wireless hard drive, the Aero 1TB takes portable wireless storage to the max whilst offering all the same features as its smaller sibling for a price that is more than well suited for a device of this type. " Thanks to Patroit for providing us with this review sample.