World’s toughest USB drive is a survivor

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 01 May 2007 22:06

Opinion and Analysis

Want the tough-guy of USB flash drives, one that is billed as the ‘Survivor’, seemingly fit to withstand just about anything you can throw at it?

No, it’s not the latest trinket to emerge from reality-TV program ‘Survivor’, it’s a USB 2.0 Flash Drive from Corsair called the ‘Flash Survivor’ that’s been built to withstand some pretty tough treatment while keeping your data safe and sound. Available in 4Gb and 8Gb sizes, at prices of US $59.99 and $129.99 each respectively, both models are water resistant to 200 meters/650 Feet/20 Atmospheres and are sealed with an EPDM (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer) waterproof seal, with tests showing no leakage or data damage.

Both drives are shock proof with “triple-point protection” against shock and impact, with the first of the three points being encasing in CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milled aluminum (which Corsair says is used in aircraft part production) to ensures consistency in material quality, which Corsair says guarantees the USB drive’s toughness.

The second of those three points is additional protection from shock and vibration through the use of rubber molded collar shielding. When dropped, the durable rubber absorbs the impact force to prevent damage to the inner drive and the USB connector.

The last of the three points is an “engineered outer metal tube” with two end caps which provides enforcement to the hollow tube and prevents it from collapsing when abused.

Corsair says that the drive is 5 times faster than ‘other drives’, has a pre-loaded security application that offers 256bit AES encryption.

Jack Peterson, the VP of Marketing at Corsair, clearly believes the drive can handle the punishment. He said that: “Corsair has built the Flash Survivor family specifically for customers with a ‘Bring It On!’ attitude – for someone who doesn’t want to worry if his/her equipment can stand up to the active lifestyle they lead Storing your valuable information on a USB flash drive capable of weathering the storm of everyday life while ensuring your data is safe – that is what Flash Survivor is all about.”

Both Flash Survivor drives deliver sustained read/write performance up to 34MB/sec and 28MB/sec respectively. Corsair also say that highly screened NAND flash is used in conjunction with an advanced memory controller to deliver “enhanced dual channel and interleave memory technologies”.

In plain English, this is what delivers the “lightning-fast file transfer” rates which Corsair say are 5 times faster than typical USB drives, and they claim to guarantee it.

They give an example that 20 office files of 1.06mb in size takes only 1 second with the Corsair Flash Survivor, while the ‘average’ USB drive would take 5 seconds.

Then next example is a set of 60 pictures, taking 279Mb of space. Corsair say they can transfer this in 17 seconds, while a regular USB drive takes more than a minute at 70 seconds.

Their third example is a 1.63Gb movie. Corsair says then can transfer this in 82 seconds, or a minute and 22 seconds. The competing ‘average’ USB drive will take 358 seconds, or 5.96 minutes to do the same job.

We haven’t had the chance to test Corsair’s claims, but if that is correct, that’s mighty fast, and bodes extremely well for the future of flash to get ever faster.

Now that Corsair have debuted the Flash Survivor, it won’t be long before SanDisk and others come out with USB flash drives that will be claimed to be even faster and tougher. It certainly puts easily scratched CDs into perspective, and at this rate, it will only be two or three years before these thumb sized USB drives hold 100Gb or more, with even more resilience than the 2007 Flash Survivor models.

Until then, the Corsair Flash Survivor certainly seems worth checking out next time you’re looking for a new USB flash drive.