Corsair Survivor gets put to the test

I’ve been intrigued by Corsair’s Survivor GT Flash Drive since it came out a little while back. I currently have a Corsair Voyager which is plenty strong enough to stand up to what I throw at it, but the Survivor promises to stand up to just about anything. The guys over at EverythingUSB got their hands on one and decided to put it to the test; here’s what they found.

If you’re interested in speed, on their test systems they managed average read/write times of 24.3MB/s and 21MB/s with a burst speed of 25MB/s. That’s a pretty decent speed, but what I’m really interested in is durability. Is it going to protect my data? The short answer is yes, but it may not be pretty.

It survived a 20 minute stay at the bottom of a 12-ft pool without a drop a moisture (it can survive in water up to 200ft deep). However, when thrown off the roof of a garage the “permanently attached” cap came flying off. It’s actually not a surprise that it came apart, it’s only attached by a 1mm collar with glue. That aside, it still performed rather well, and still kept the data safe. The big test was when he drove his Honda Element over the Survivor. He did this multiple times, and found the drive scratched up, but intact. He wasn’t able to unscrew it by hand, but the cap came off again and the USB connector was bent down.

Did it still work when he plugged it into his PC? You bet your sweet ass it did! All of his data was safe and sound, though the drive was in pretty bad shape, and he wouldn’t want to carry it around much more. The great thing is that with the Corsair Survivor, you know your data is going to be safe under almost any condition. If it does get destroyed or beaten up badly, Corsair has an awesome 10 year warranty that will replace the whole drive, or just the outer casing (whatever you need) so long as you send them the remains of your old one. Now that’s a warranty.

Corsair’s Ultimate Survivor Flash Drive [via everythingusb]