REVIEW: 32GB Corsair Voyager GT USB 3.0 Flash Drive Impresses

Design and Quality
The first thing you notice about the drive is that it is quite large, 4 inches long (~10cm), 1 inch wide (~2.5cm), and 0.5 inches thick (~1.25cm) all measured at their respective maximum points along the device.

It has a thick and durable rubber housing, and is touted as being water proof and shock resistant. It also comes with a lanyard loop to allow the user to attach it to a keychain, however, given the size of the flash drive, it seems like it would be impractical to attach to most people's keychains.


Corsair FlashVoyager GT USB 3.0 is a bit longer than the USB 2.0 Voyagers of yesteryear...

The cap is a removable rubber cover which sits quite snugly and securely over the business end of the drive, so there is a very low likelihood of it slipping off and getting lose. One minor concern is that there is no way to attach the cap to the flash drive while the flash drive is in use, making it easier for the user to lose the cap while the drive is plugged in. It is not a fatal flaw by any means, but it would have been nice to have a way to secure the cap to the device while in use.

The device has gotten a lot of use, and has proven to be quite durable. Considering it is backed by a five year warranty, there really is not much to worry about.

Benchmarks
The drive was tested using an Alienware M14x laptop with the following specifications:

• Intel Core i7 2630QM 2.00GHz
• 8GB PNY Optima DDR3-1066 (2x4GB)
• NVIDIA GeForce GT555M
• 240GB Patriot Wildfire SSD

We used a mixture of synthetic and real world benchmarks in order to gauge performance for both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 speeds.

AIDA64 v2.00
AIDA64 showed exceptional performance for USB 3.0 reads, just under 160 MB/s for random reads, far exceeding what Corsair listed in the specifications.


AIDA64 v2.00 Read Speed Benchmark showed 130.9 to 159.9MB/s, being in line with the statement from the box, and in case of random read, well above what was stated.

However the writes were somewhat mediocre, showing at a max of 35.6 MB/s and an average of 34.6 MB/s.




Now, let's see how the drive fares when hooked onto a USB 2.0 port. Realistically speaking, over the lifetime of this drive, you'll be putting it into USB 2.0 computers more often than you do find USB 3.0 ports in the wild... that will change over time, but still.


We tested the drive in USB 2.0 port as well, expecting excellent results. However, the speeds were not there, as we were limited by the USB 2.0 controller

As you can see on the image above, the limiting factor is either a 3rd party USB 2.0 controller on the motherboard, or one inside the FlashVoyager GT. This drive is as fast as Corsair's USB 2.0 drives though (not counting the SLC-based FlashVoyager GT's of yesteryear). For performance, you need to use the USB 3.0 port.