32GB Flash Survivor by Corsair Reviewed

So I've had the 32GB Corsair Flash Survivor for a few days now which has been time enough for me to run some benchmarks on it and see how practical it is for every day use. I must say, I love it, I was copying some files to it for a friend, and I came to the realization that for once I didn't have to worry about copying too much and filling up the flash drive mid copy as there is almost nothing I could copy to this drive that would fill it up.

For some stats on file transfer speeds I did some tests. While it was empty, I ran HD Tach and HD Tune on it, the results of which you'll see below. Then I did some of my own tests where I transferred files as close to 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB as I could get and timed each of those file transfers.

File 1 – 8.2GB 26 files started 2:14:30 stopped 2:24:58 = 628 seconds

8,810,724,352 bytes size = 14029815.85 bytes per second

8,810,938,368 bytes size on disk

File 2 – 2.05GB 10 files 3 folders started 2:26:30 stopped 2:29:13 = 163 seconds

2,202,269,054 bytes size = 13510853.09 bytes per second

2,202,370,048 bytes size on disk

File 3 – 4.11GB 922 files 65 folders started 2:40:00 stopped 2:53:04 = 784 seconds

4,416,078,880 bytes size = 5632753.67 bytes per second

4,424,056,832 bytes size on disk

Those are the results of that test, as you can see, that puts all of them slightly above 13MB/sec write speed on real world file transfer, and just to let you know, the first 2 files were videos and the 3rd was all music (with some album art thrown in there).

For the HD Tach test, there is a picture below, but the results were pretty good, it had a random access time of 2ms, an average read speed of 21.7MB/second, and a burst speed of 23.9MB/second.

The HD Tune test shows transfer rates of 19.8MB/second max, 16.8MB/second min, and 19.3MB/second average. The access time for this test was 1.7ms and the burst rate was 13.1MB/second.

So, in conclusion, generally the larger a drive gets, the slower these speeds get, but that was clearly not the case with this drive, the average transfer speed of 19.3MB/sec is nothing to write home about, but its not as bad as I expected for such a large drive. So, as a flash drive for every day use, I love it, and its great, if you need something faster, than Corsair has the faster GT model available in 8GB that nearly doubles the transfer speeds, but for the average user, or even for a professional user that doesn't need really high transfer speeds, this drive is perfect. As for its advertised indestructibility, well, I didn't have a 200 meter deep pond to drop it into, and I didn't feel like chancing it under the tire of my truck, but I have been banging it around a lot, trying to do damage, and I threw it in the clothes washer to see if it could take a beating while keeping the water out, and it worked fine, so if those were major concerns of yours, you need not worry. Overall, I give it 4 out of 5 gears.

[rating:4/5]