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Published: June 17, 2009 | Source: Corsair | Author: Tom Koflach

Corsair Flash Voyager 32gb Review

Test Setup 
 
During today’s testing we will be comparing the Flash Voyager to the OCZ Throttle, as well as a generic USB flash drive picked up from a trade show. To make all the results comparable the tests were all run on the same machine, the specifications for which can be seen below:
 
Intel Q6600 G0 2.4ghz,
MSI P45D3 Platinum,
4gb Corsair DHX 1600mhz DDR3,
Gigabyte 4850 1gb,
Samsung F1 1tb Boot Drive,
OCZ ModXstream 500w PSU,
Custom Water cooling,
Vista Home Premium x64
 
HDtach
 
Our first port of call for testing was HDtach. The program allows us to test the read speed of each of the drives, making it easy to compare the drives side by side. We ran the longer of the two tests available in the program, 32mb zones, on each drive and then compared the read speed, burst speed and latency of each drive.
 
 
 
 
Impressively the Voyager managed to outperform the OCZ throttle in the HDtach tests, although it is worth noting that the Throttle was connected through USB, rather than the far superior eSata interface which it also offers. The generic USB drive, as expected, was a clear mile behind in terms of read speed and a full 15mb/s behind the Voyager. The Voyager also held on well when comparing average and burst reads, with only a small difference between the two.
 
Random file Write 
 
Write speeds tend to be the Achilles heel of any flash based drive. Write speeds can vary depending on the type of memory used, SLC or MLC and the controller used to control the memory. To see how well each drive performs in a real world test, we downloaded a copy of 3d Mark Vantage, which is around 420mb in size. We then used a stop watch to see how long it took for the file to be written to each of our flash drives, with the times quoted in seconds. 
 
 
As you can see, the Corsair drive really struggles here, falling behind the OCZ Throttle by quite some margin. Fortunately for Corsair, the Voyager does still outperform the generic USB drive by an absolute age. Looking at the results it would seem that the Throttle’s USB controller is bottlenecking it in the read tests, but has less of an effect on writes. The Corsair’s controller on the other hand manages the reads much better, but the drive seems to struggle in comparision with the OCZ on the writes.    Â