Reviewed by: yanusbfd on 29-Sep-08 Rating: 
Strengths:Heavy duty construction, reasonably fast
Weaknesses:Heavy and bulky
Summary:I picked one of these up during a recent rebate promotion because how could you not want a USB drive housed in a milled anodized aircraft-grade aluminum cylinder that is supposedly water-tight down to 200 meters? I certainly felt the need to acquire one, and, as with any other USB drive that comes my way, I proceeded to run my usual tests.
First off, I copy a directory of CD cover scans consisting of 500+ files in 24 folders totaling 60+ MB from my hard drive to the USB flash drive.
The 16 GB Corsair Survivor takes 44.8 seconds to do this. My 16 GB OCZ Rally2 needs 51.8 seconds for the same task, so the Corsair drive is a little bit faster. Neither comes anywhere near the 9.5 seconds in which my Lexar 4 GB JumpDrive Lightning dispatches the same collection of files, but I have no such expectations of either being able to do so. Large USB flash drives are simply not that fast because more individual flash die components are needed to build drives of such large size. In fact, it\'ll be a real accomplishment when anything over 4 GB can pull off the same copying task in 30 seconds or less.
Next, I copy a 310 MB compressed CD ISO from my hard drive to the USB flash drive. The Survivor does this in 24 seconds compared to 21.5 seconds for the Rally2. Notice how much better these times are for one large file relative to those for the collection of 500+ files. The newest generation of NAND flash components have larger page sizes and and caching mechanisms that allow reads from and writes to the flash to be overlapped with page buffer transfers of data across the external NAND interface. Obviously, both the Corsair and OCZ drives take advantage of these features in a way that improves transfer times for individual large files, but no similar improvement can be obtained when moving a very large number of files. Again, for reference purposes, the Lexar 4 GB JumpDrive Lightning pulls off this same copy in 15 seconds.
Note that I don\'t test USB flash drive read performance. Write performance is always the bottleneck, and I\'ve found that write performance correlates pretty well with read performance, e.g. fast writing = fast reading. Also, these times are under Windows 2000 SP 4. Performance under Windows XP is comparable for larger files, but 3 to 4 times slower when copying the 500+ file folder.
So, the Corsair 16 GB Survivor is plenty fast for such a large USB drive and is certainly worth the small premium it commands relative to more generic USB drives of the same size. The craftmanship behind this drive is really something else and, for me, kind of puts SanDisk\'s Cruzer Titanium line to shame. This thing is built like a veritable tank and could probably survive being run over by one, too. The only real downside to this device is that it\'s kind of heavy and bulky when compared to the svelte OCZ 16 GB Rally2, but I don\'t really consider that a disadvantage for something with the moniker \"Survivor.\"
First off, I copy a directory of CD cover scans consisting of 500+ files in 24 folders totaling 60+ MB from my hard drive to the USB flash drive.
The 16 GB Corsair Survivor takes 44.8 seconds to do this. My 16 GB OCZ Rally2 needs 51.8 seconds for the same task, so the Corsair drive is a little bit faster. Neither comes anywhere near the 9.5 seconds in which my Lexar 4 GB JumpDrive Lightning dispatches the same collection of files, but I have no such expectations of either being able to do so. Large USB flash drives are simply not that fast because more individual flash die components are needed to build drives of such large size. In fact, it\'ll be a real accomplishment when anything over 4 GB can pull off the same copying task in 30 seconds or less.
Next, I copy a 310 MB compressed CD ISO from my hard drive to the USB flash drive. The Survivor does this in 24 seconds compared to 21.5 seconds for the Rally2. Notice how much better these times are for one large file relative to those for the collection of 500+ files. The newest generation of NAND flash components have larger page sizes and and caching mechanisms that allow reads from and writes to the flash to be overlapped with page buffer transfers of data across the external NAND interface. Obviously, both the Corsair and OCZ drives take advantage of these features in a way that improves transfer times for individual large files, but no similar improvement can be obtained when moving a very large number of files. Again, for reference purposes, the Lexar 4 GB JumpDrive Lightning pulls off this same copy in 15 seconds.
Note that I don\'t test USB flash drive read performance. Write performance is always the bottleneck, and I\'ve found that write performance correlates pretty well with read performance, e.g. fast writing = fast reading. Also, these times are under Windows 2000 SP 4. Performance under Windows XP is comparable for larger files, but 3 to 4 times slower when copying the 500+ file folder.
So, the Corsair 16 GB Survivor is plenty fast for such a large USB drive and is certainly worth the small premium it commands relative to more generic USB drives of the same size. The craftmanship behind this drive is really something else and, for me, kind of puts SanDisk\'s Cruzer Titanium line to shame. This thing is built like a veritable tank and could probably survive being run over by one, too. The only real downside to this device is that it\'s kind of heavy and bulky when compared to the svelte OCZ 16 GB Rally2, but I don\'t really consider that a disadvantage for something with the moniker \"Survivor.\"
