Corsair Flash Voyager Slider Review

The popular Corsair Flash Voyager is shockproof, rugged and water resistant thanks to its all-rubber shell. The Flash Voyager GT adds faster read and write speeds while retaining exactly the same design. Then there’s Flash Voyager Mini, which is small enough to be attached to your keychain. At the time of launch, the original Flash Voyager looked nothing like the ordinary USB flash drives available, but such designs are much more common today.

Capless design with a retractable mechanism

The latest addition to Corsair’s premium Flash Voyager lineup is the Slider, which uses the USB 3.0 interface. We received an 8 GB sample from Corsair, and here’s what it has to offer.

Features

Unlike its rubber-shelled siblings, the Flash Voyager Slider isn’t water resistant and shock proof because the shell is made of plastic. It gets its name from the sliding mechanism that retracts the connector within the shell when not in use. To expose the connector, you have to grip the body firmly with your thumb and pull the sliding tab back towards you. The body of the drive has a matte finish and the surface of the sliding tab is rubberized. There are tiny indents on the sides which provide a good grip, so it’s easy to slide the connector out. A tiny LED at the tip of the drive indicates read/write activity, but when idle, the LED stays off. Just above the LED is an eyelet to attach a neck/wrist strap.

The Flash Voyager Slider is available in 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB capacities, and comes with a five year warranty.

Pull back to expose the USB connector

 

Build

The Flash Voyager Slider is slightly larger and thicker than other USB flash drives because of the sliding mechanism. The overall build quality is good, but it could have been better.

Performance

The rated sequential read and write speeds of the 8 GB and 16 GB variants of this drive are 70 MB/s and 20 MB/s respectively. The read speed of the 32 GB variant is 80 MB/s and the write is twice as fast. The 64 GB variant is the fastest with read and write speeds of a whopping 85 MB/s and 70 MB/s respectively. We plugged this drive into a USB 3.0 port on our Ivy Bridge test rig, and here’s what it logged.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark: This tool measures sequential read and write speeds using a set size of data and a specified number of loops. We set the data size to 500 MB and number of loops to 3. The sequential read and write speeds logged were 64 MB/s and 15 MB/s respectively. This was quite close to the rated speed, however speeds with multiple 512K and 4K chunks show that the drive would stagger when transferring multiple small files.

SiSoft Sandra 2012

 

SiSoft Sandra 2012:The nature of the File System benchmark in SiSoft Sandra is similar to that of CrystalDiskMark. The speeds that we got here were similar to those reported by CDM, however, the random write speed of 2.43 MB/s was disappointing.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

 

ATTO Disk Benchmark: This tool also uses a set size of data and measures read and write speed using chunks of data ranging from 0.5 KB to 8 MB. Here, the maximum sequential read and write speeds were 67 MB/s and 15 MB/s respectively.

Real world file transfer: Here, we transferred 100 MB of assorted files to the drive and measured the speeds using a stopwatch. The speeds were similar to the synthetic tests: 58 MB/s read and 6 MB/s write.

Verdict and Price in India

The 8 GB Corsair Flash Voyager Slider retails for Rs. 832. An ordinary USB 2.0 flash drive of the same capacity can be purchased for around Rs. 280 today. For the price of this drive you could easily buy a 16 GB USB 2.0 drive and still have Rs 300 left. The choice here is between speed and capacity. If your PC or laptop has a USB 3.0 port and you want read speed almost five times faster than a USB 2.0 drive, buy the Voyager Slider. But if high capacity at a low price is what you prefer or if your PC doesn’t have a USB 3.0 port, then buy a USB 2.0 flash drive.