Flash Survivor USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Flash Survivor ships in a large 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. Corsair don't often change their flash drive product names, there are older USB 2.0 versions of this drive. 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: CMFSV3-16GB which is the newer and faster USB 3.0 Flash Survivor.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Flash Survivor measures 8.5cm long, 2.4cm wide and 2.4cm high. This is by far the largest flash drive we have seen. 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. As well as being the bulkiest drive the Flash Survivor is also the heaviest by far weighing 43 grams. This drive is approximately twice both the size and weight of most other flash drives.

Build Quality

This drive is something else in terms of build quality. Opening the drive feels like unscrewing a time capsule that the ancients buried centuries ago. The drive is extremely well built and feels like it would be more appropriate housing for diamonds rather than a flash drive. I guess nobody knows what kind of top secret and classified files will transported on one of these drives. The drive has a very secure place to fasten a key ring and would no doubt withstand knocks and bumps far better than its owner. I don't know who would benefit from this level of flash drive security, possibly surfers that like to carry their documents whilst catching waves?

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 Survivor scored 77/21 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 13.9 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 Survivor are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 77/23 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 Survivor would take 64.4 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 Survivor performed relatively very well in this test.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Flash Survivor is twice both the size and weight of most flash drives. This drive would be as well suited to smuggling diamonds as it is to carrying mp3's and word documents around. If you need a seriously robust flash drive, then this is almost certainly going to be your best choice. From a performance perspective the Flash Survivor is slightly below average but there are no glaring weaknesses, it has a well-rounded performance profile. Finally in terms of value this drive is towards the bottom of the pile unless you need super rugged features in which case it's a very good option.

USBFlashPro
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Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.