Getting wet, benchmarking and final thoughts
Well, it was still working after being submerged in cold water for five minutes and that was a bit of a relief.
But, no, we didn't boil it though we did drop it from 10ft directly on to concrete and that didn't impact on its functionality either.
However, these aren't the most strenuous of tests - our own Nick Haywood has some other ideas of his own and they involve testing the drive to destruction!
We've said that the Corsair is not the smallest but it will still fit into the palm of a small hand with ease.
The drive's capacity is printed on top of the blue activity LED and - unlike some drives - the eye for the lanyard is big enough to allow it to be fed through without resorting to any microscope work or the use of nano-tools.
How fast is it, then?
To test just how fast the Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB USB2.0 drive was in real-world conditions, we benchmarked it using the PC spec'd out below:| System | AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice S939 CPU EPoX 9NPA3+ nForce4 Ultra motherboard 2GiB of Corsair PC6400 Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) hard drive Windows XP Professional SP2 |
|---|---|
| Benchmarks | HDTach 3.0.1.0 RW Large and small file-copy folders |
We used two folders of data - transferring to and from a freshly formatted Seagate 160GB SATAII hard drive. The first folder, defined as large, held a DVD Shrink version of the Spartan DVD. It contained 14 files in three folders and totalled 4.35GiB (4,680,843,264 bytes). The large size of the VOB file sizes should allow high sustained transfer speeds and show off the Flash Voyager's in/out characteristics in a good light.
The second folder, defined as small, contained a total of 115 files, also in three folders. Here, though, they amounted to just 169MiB (177,591,784 bytes) and contained a mixture of JPEG, Microsoft Word and Excel files, plus some larger ZIP files and a few backed-up emails. In short, the sort of data that you may well want to transfer between PCs on a daily basis.
The time taken to write to and read from the Corsair Flash Voyager drive was noted using a stopwatch. The PC was rebooted after each read/write and each test was carried out three times. The recorded times were all within a 3% standard deviation. The graph below takes overall size and time into account to produce the MiB/s metric.
The large files in the 4.35GiB set do indeed show off the drive's speed, with a read speed approaching 1GiB/m and a write speed that's none to shabby either - the sustained read speed is almost comparable to that of a hard disk drive.
The extra files, especially small-sized ones, combine to reduce the 'small' read speed to a still-impressive 25.4MiB/s. Writing speed, though, was far less impressive - the drive really struggled.
What about the synthetic, but still useful, HDTach 3.0.1.0 RW benchmarks?
These confirm the Corsair's blazing read and write speed - in ideal conditions.
Overall thoughts
Corsair's Flash Voyager 8GB USB2.0 is the fastest drive in the company's range. It's also the fastest USB pen drive that we've come across.Our testing showed that, under ideal conditions, it was able to read at over 30MB/s and write at 16MB/s. Performance was almost comparable to that of an internal hard disk drive.
There are other benefits, too, from this £90 drive. It comes bundled with an open-source encryption program, has spacious capacity and boasts a ruggedised exterior that's resistant to water and bad treatment.
You can buy 8GB flash-based USB drives cheaper, sure, but if performance and durability are high on your list of requirements - and they should be - there's nothing we've yet seen that's better. Recommended.
Watch out, too, for our next review of a USB stick drive - it's rather out of the ordinary. We'll be looking at a 12GB product from Verbatim - the Store 'n' Go - that's based on a 1in hard disk drive! Naturally, we'll be comparing it with the performance of the flash-based Corsair Voyager over a number of scenarios.
HEXUS Awards
The Corsair Flash Voyager (CMFUSB2.0-8GB) gains the HEXUS Media Recommended award for offering the twin benefits of fast performance and a ruggedised casing.
Corsair Flash Voyager (CMFUSB2.0-8GB)
