Legit Reviews

Corsair 16GB Flash Voyager USB 3.0 Review

Corsair officially launched the companies first generation USB 3.0 Flash drives on May 19th, 2011 and more recently on September 9th, 2011 they announced the launch of their second generation USB 3.0 Flash drives. Legit Reviews got our hands on one of these new '2nd generation' Flash Voyager 3.0 16GB drives and just had to run some performance tests on it to see how these new drives perform!

The performance of the 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager was inline with what Corsair said it would be. With benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark we found 81 MB/s read speeds and 22 MB/s write speeds on a USB 3.0 connection. The max read speed of 81 MB/s is nice, but the write speed left us wanting a little more. Just for fun we tried this drive on the USB 2.0 port on the same test system and saw that it was hitting...

Article Title: Corsair 16GB Flash Voyager USB 3.0 Review
Article URL http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1714/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $19.99 after a $5 rebate with free shipping

Stupid question alert. Does changing the file system (FAT16, FAT32, eXFAT, NTFS, etc...) change the performance? If my thumb drive is 8GB or more I always run it as NTFS. If it's lower than 8GB I'll run it as FAT32.

nah it's the same...

It came FAT32, so I left it that way... But I also normally run exFAT or NTFS on my big thumb drives.

Overall good set of tests, though I think the absolutely horrible random write performance should have been brought up. Copying a set of small files to this stick should be just as slow as it was 8 years ago!

Major_A wrote:Stupid question alert. Does changing the file system (FAT16, FAT32, eXFAT, NTFS, etc...) change the performance? If my thumb drive is 8GB or more I always run it as NTFS. If it's lower than 8GB I'll run it as FAT32.

You might see some slight differences in performance depending on the Allocation Size you give the drive. But the file system won't change anything besides what the largest file you can put on it is.

FAT32 is limited to 4GB files if I recall. exFAT & NTFS can take up to 16EBs files or something crazy like that.

Tator Tot wrote:FAT32 is limited to 4GB files if I recall. exFAT & NTFS can take up to 16EBs files or something crazy like that.

Knew that much that's why I run my drives according to size. I've messed with the allocation size when I was transferring large files but I didn't see any difference in speed (significant or insignificant).

Major_A wrote:Knew that much that's why I run my drives according to size. I've messed with the allocation size when I was transferring large files but I didn't see any difference in speed (significant or insignificant).

You're really only gonna see a difference if you're running a large drive array (4 x 500GB Samsung F3's on a PERC 5/i), which is usually in the ballpark of $250.

I've not done any testing with large drive arrays on RAID Controllers with SSD's, because there's currently not a cheap option for SSD optimized RAID controllers. A PERC 5/i can be had for $100 or so, off Ebay.
So it's a bit easier to implement your own home server with one of those, compared to the $12,000 solutions for SSD based storage.

Though, SSD's themselves are not as cheap as HDD's. Which limits the usage of 4+ drive arrays as well.

Cool product. I'm glad to see some innovation.

However, in my experience, the write speed is the one that needs to be improved more than read speed. When I think back on the times that I'm sitting at my PC, impatiently watching the progress meter, it's always when I'm trying to dump a few files onto a drive to take somewhere else. Most recently, I was trying to copy a few video files to take to my parents' house. It was awful.

Write speed needs to be improved.