Flash Voyager USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Flash Voyager ships in a plastic bubble wrap. The drive comes with a five year warranty which is clearly printed on the back of the package. The only other thing on the back of the package is the all important bar code and serial number. Corsiar don't often change their flash drive product names, there are older USB 2.0 versions of this drive. There are even two versions of the USB 3.0 Flash Voyager, in short you need to check the serial number to be sure of which version of the drive you are getting. We find this a little annoying ... The drive on test is the: CMFVY3S-16GB which is the newer and faster version of the USB 3.0 Flash Voyager.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Flash Voyager measures 7.3cm long, 2.2cm wide and 1.3cm high. At 7.3 x 2.2 cm the Voyager is amongst the larger drives. A fair proportion of the length goes towards making a secure area to pass a key ring through. With these dimensions this flash drive obstructs adjacent ports on a computer so you might need to get an extension cable if you have a lot of devices connected to the same cluster of USB ports on your PC. In terms of weight at 17 grams the Voyager is heavier than average for a flash drive.

Build Quality

The Flash Voyager has a chunky feel to it. We are pretty sure you could throw it off a tall building and find no harm had come to your data. This is mostly thanks to the generous rubber casing that houses the drive. There is a small LED indicator on the back of the drive and there is a strong and secure loop on one end of the drive where you can attach a key ring. The cap sticks on reasonably well but because the outside of the drive is so grippy there is still a substantial risk of cap loss. The drive kind of resembles the space shuttle voyager, I am not sure if this was corsairs intention but given the status of the shuttle program I guess its not an association they want to keep.

Front

Back

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The Flash Voyager scored 79/22 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. The sequential read speed is good but we would have liked to see a faster write speed on this drive. The strongest relative area of performance for this drive is its 4K read speed which clocked in at 10.7 MB/s and is amongst the highest we have seen. Overall the performance is slightly below average but there are no glaring weaknesses in this drives performance making it more versatile than most.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

ATTO Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Score

The ATTO results for the Flash Voyager are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 75/22 MB/s come in just over Corsair's claimed read/write speeds of 75/18 MB/s.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Real World Copy Speed Score

This test shows that the Flash Voyager would take 68.82 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates. The Flash Voyager performed relatively well in this test.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

Physically the Flash Voyager is longer and wider than most drives, it has a very solid and safe feel to it thanks to its somewhat oversized rubber casing. In terms of performance the drives profile is reasonably consistent but not record breaking in any particular areas. From a value perspective the drive is somewhere in the middle of the pack, you will not go far wrong with this drive but there are better deals to be had.

USBFlashPro
level
1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.