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Corsair Survivor GT 8GB USB Flash Drive Review

Click to enlarge

The Corsair Flash Survivor GT is an extremely durable, water resistant, drop-tested flash USB memory drive. In fact others have dropped the Flash Survivor GT to the bottom of a pool for 30 minutes, put it in a boiling pot of water for over ten minutes, and hit it with a hammer several times! After the abuse the Corsair Flash Survivor GT continued to work as good as new. The outer case is made from extremely strong CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum. The EPDM (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer Rubber) seal makes the Survivor water resistant to 200M! The Survivor is also protected from vibration or impact damage through the use of a molded shock dampening collar and it comes with a Ten year warranty. Interesting enough Corsair has released two versions: Survivor is a regular version rated at a read speed of 19 MB/sec and a write speed of 13 MB/sec Survivor GT is the faster version which is rated at a read speed of 34 MB/sec and a write speed of 25 MB/sec. Obviously the GT is the Turbo version and it also costs a few dollars more, I purchased my Survivor GT from PC Cyber for a $155 (Cad)

So why would anyone want a virtually indestructible USB flash drive?
I have owned quite a few USB flash drives and I have either lost the cap or bent the drive from forgetting it was in my back pocket as I sat down to a rather alarming 'crunch' sound, so my first thought was I shouldn't be able to break this one or loose the cap so easy. I admit the Survivor is overkill but the next closet that I'd consider is the SanDisk 4GB Cruzer Titanium Flash Drive as the connector is retractable and the body is made of metal but it only comes in 4GB version (for now) and I had read that the GT was one of the fastest kids on the block.

Forget the numbers is it really that fast?
Short answer is Yes and to prove it I have done some real world write and read tests with a few other USB flash drives. Before you look at the charts I will mention that the write speed when copying many small files never even reaches a measly 1MB/sec but it bested the slowest drive by a margin of 37 minutes! the chart is below and the best time for each test is indicated in RED

Tests were run on: Windows XP with SP2 Intel 2.8Ghz HT CPU 1GB Ram and 80GB sata HD	Write 6,989 files (127MB)	Write 339 .jpgs (174MB)	Write .avi file (692MB)	Read 6,989 files (127MB)	Read 339 .jpgs (174MB)	Read .avi file (692MB)
Kingston Data Traveler 2GB	47 Min & 11 sec	3 Min & 2 sec	4 Min & 34 sec	4 Min & 2 sec	1 Min & 47 sec	1 Min & 2 sec
Apacer Handy Steno 1 GB	34 Min & 40 sec	2 Min & 30 sec	2 Min & 39 sec	6 Min & 10 sec	2 Min & 10 sec	2 Min & 30 sec
OCZ Rally 2 4GB	11 Min & 15 sec	1 Min & 14 sec	2 Min & 10 sec	4 Min & 6 sec	19 sec	1 Min & 5 sec
Corsair Survivor GT 8GB	10 Min & 3 sec	32 sec	1 Min & 10 sec	2 Min	20 sec	56 sec

The OCZ Rally 4 GB was able to beat the Survivor GT in the 174MB (339.jpgs) test by a mere 1 second but as I'm sure you've noticed the Survivor won the rest of the tests by a fairly wide margin.

I was curious just how fast the Survivor would be compared to other medium so I tried a copying a 4455MB file from the sources listed below

The Survivor GT was slightly behind the USB Portable HD at 21.8 MB/Sec and below the rated 34 MB/sec but it comes very close to the HD for read speeds. So lets see what happens when we use the same 4455 MB file for writing to the HD and the Survivor.

The Survivor GT was behind the USB Portable HD at 18.7 MB/Sec and below the rated 25 MB/sec but the tests were run on an average speed system and a faster CPU may bring the speed up a bit but the speeds listed by manufacturers are always theoretical speeds real world speeds are always slower.

So here we have a USB Flash drive that almost performs as well as USB Portable HD and is quite roomy at 8GB. Add the near indestructible metal casing and you have one heck of a piece of portable hardware. Now if they can make a 16GB or 20GB version I might just dump the portable HD forever!