Corsair Flash Survivor

Reviews: Storage

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Max Slowik
Kurtis
Corsair
Apr. 23, 2009

Specifications

Introduction

Did you ever want to use a flash drive as a weapon? Like, reach into your pocket as two shifty characters come towards you, and clutching it like a roll of quarters, use it to line up all your knuckles into a perfect, orbit-crushing fist? Yeah, well, now that I’ve planted that idea in your head, let me introduce Corsair’s Flash Survivor to you.

This flash drive is designed to withstand, or at the very least, designed to look like it withstands. While I would say that it’s unnecessarily wrought, there probably is a market for undestroyable flash drives. Without a doubt this flash drive is as solid as they come; if something could take out the case, then certainly it’s force that should worry its owner in an oncoming semi kind of way.

First Impressions

But I will say that it’s looks over actual robustness, for two reasons. The first is that it comes with a Corsair dog tag. If that’s not a style statement, I don’t know what else could be. Maybe a screen for tattooing the logo somewhere on your neck is a stronger statement. The second reason is that before I even did any stress-testing, I sort of ripped off one of the rubber grips for opening up the drive. I fixed it with a touch of glue.

Included with the flash drive was an outdated copy of TrueCrypt, which is open-source data protection software. If you’re interested in it, get the more recent software from that link.

Still, it’s backed with a ten-year warranty and I couldn’t break it trying. It’s waterproof at any of the depth available to me (washing machine) and tough enough that I’d worry more about other people getting hit with it than it getting damaged under any extreme circumstance.

Testing

I tested the drive by copying files to and from it, timing things with a stopwatch. I tested the read and write speeds four different ways, first with a CD-sized single file, an ISO, to check large file sizes. For medium file sizes, I transferred a folder full of 10MB raw images, for small files, I used a folder of about 1.5MB .jpg images, and for tiny files, I used a folder full of Windows system files averaging 20K each.

Except for the tiny file read speeds, this drive performed admirably. With tiny files, it performed adequately, so on that front, it’s definitely above average. For large files, maintaining transfer speeds above 25MB/s is very snappy.

Writing files, this drive still outperforms other Corsair flash drives, although I wouldn’t say it’s a show of force. Especially with tiny files, where the drive was never above 1MB/s. I would not use this drive to boot. The large file write speeds are good, though, with speeds above 10MB/s.

Conclusion

This drive is good for photos and videos, and ideal for having a flash drive that can keep up with your rough-and-tumble ego. Or if you’re klutzy, it’ll probably be OK with that, too. To sum: it's a not-bad, not-great, tough, metal, water-resistant thumb drive.

Pros

Better than average performance

Extremely strong case

Cons

Large

Costs extra

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by a2z on June 17, 2009 - 9:40 am

I've never seen these before. I am familiar with corsair 32GB Voyager. Believe it or not, "real" capacity comes in at a mere 34.4GB!
Thanks for the heads up.
http://Webstore.com/~a2zHere

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