Corsair Flash Voyager GT 16GB

Performance:

The Corsair Flash Voyager GT 16GB was tested with a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, which is made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 Penryn, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 128MB, 120GB SATA HDD, and 2GB of DDR2-667 system memory. The operating system in use was Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. Corsair Flash Voyager drives have no compatibility problems with Linux as long as you are using the Linux 2.4 kernel or newer.

For testing the drive's read performance, we had used hdparm on Linux. When testing the write performance, we averaged the amount of time needed to transfer 1245MB worth of photographs from the ThinkPad's internal hard drive over to the Corsair CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT. This flash drive had a read performance of 25MB/s, which is slower than the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo that had performed at 31MB/s and the 8GB Flash Voyager GT reading at about 29MB/s. However, all of the other flash drives tested were of an 8GB capacity of SLC memory. Transferring the JPEG images to the Flash Voyager GT when it was formatted to FAT32 yielded a rate of about 10MB/s.

Conclusion:

With Corsair now offering the Flash Voyager GT in 16GB and 32GB capacities, it's reaching a point where you more or less have a small hard drive in your pocket. The Flash Voyager GT 16GB is big enough where you could easily install Ubuntu or Fedora to this drive and still have room left over to store your files. The read speeds with the CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT were not that bad even though it hadn't outperformed the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo or earlier Corsair flash drives. This drive isn't as fast as unlike the smaller Flash Voyager GTs that use SLC (Single-Layer Cell) memory, Corsair had to utilize MLC (Multi-Layer Cell) memory in order to achieve the 16GB capacity. MLC memory yields twice the memory capacity in the same size physical footprint, but its performance isn't as good as SLC solutions. The soft rubber casing on the Flash Voyager GT is enough to ensure that the drive will not be destroyed if you happen to drop it, take it for a swim, leave it in the washing machine, or even leave it in the freezer for some unknown reason. The Corsair Flash Voyager GT can be purchased in a 16GB capacity for about $100 USD, which is quite affordable in fact, while the 32GB model will cost around $160 USD. If you are in the market for a high capacity USB 2.0 flash drive, the Corsair Flash Voyager GT series is worth considering.