Corsair Flash Voyager GT 16GB USB 2.0 CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT Review

Corsair Flash Voyager GT 16GB USB 2.0 CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT Review

What you get in the package:
The 16GB Flash voyager GT
A Corsair lanyard which can attach to your memory card, so you can wear it like a necklace
A Male to Female USB extension cable (24inches)
The serial number/model number/spec sheet/10year warranty













First thoughts:
Corsair changed their packaging on their flash voyager GT drives. I noticed this because my 2GB and 4GB Flash Voyager GT's I purchased a little over a year ago had a different image in the packaging.
The differences do appear though. The 16GB model is noticeably thicker than the 2GB and 4GB model I had.

When I plugged in the memory card into my computer the drive was shown as 15.1GB.
What I noticed is that Corsair no longer ships their cards preinstalled with the TrueCrypt software which I received with my other flash voyager GT's.
It is not a big deal since I have a copy of True Crypt from my other card, and I can only imagine that it is pretty easy to get a copy of online.

My first intention was to scan the drive for errors. I ran the “error scan” utility of hdtune, and it scans around 20mb/sec. The test took 13 minutes and 2 seconds to scan 15.1Gb, so it scans a little more than 1Gb per minute



While scanning I noticed another difference the new 16GB model has a different color LED. The indicator bulb is a small clear rubber which has the marking “16G” on it to signify the capacity. The blue LED is noticeably brighter and runs the more neon blue color than the old one did. Again, not a problem, I am just stating my findings.





Size, coloration, materiality, manufacturing quality:

This card is rather large, it is noticeably wider than the 2GB and 4GB models, and most likely because the memory chips inside are probably stacked on top of each other or on multiple PCB’s. On the 4GB model there were two memory cells, one on either side of the PCB, and in this card I imagine there are about 4-8 memory cells, judging from the cards thickness. I would say the new drive is maybe 5-7mm wider than the 4GB model. It is hard to measure since the cards are elliptical in both plan and section.

The card measures:
3 inches in length (~77mm)
1 inch in width (25mm)
5/8” in thickness (16mm)












The USB card is coated in a vibrant protective rubber shield, which protects the card in the event that it is dropped. One end is home to the male USB head, and the other opposing end has a hole for the included Corsair keychain lanyard to pass through.
The card is mainly red and black with yellow, white and red embellished lettering.



What I have found with these cards is that they are very bouncy, they can be like a bouncy ball. So in event that you drop it, as long as you have the rubber USB cap on the card is protected. The rubber does degrade a bit over a year, as the oils from your skin seep into the rubber, making the originally dull rubber surface, shiny and slick.
What you will find is that this happens to the cap as well.
The USB cap is made of the same rubber as is the shell of the card. Over time, the USB caps do become worn, yielding a loose fit over the USB head. This can be problematic because the caps do disappear. Luckily Corsair has realized this flaw, and offers replacement memory caps on their website.

You can place an order here for extra replacement memory caps. If my memory serves me correct you get 2 replacement caps. Just remember to pick the right model drive because the caps are noticeably different in size when comparing the 4GB and 16GB models.
http://www.corsair.com/_datasheets/CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT.pdf


The Corsair Flash Voyager GT cards are manufactured by Corsair in their manufacturing plant in Taiwan. Both my memory cards were manufactured in Taiwan. When I purchased my first card I was upset by this because all of my desktop Corsair memory was made in the United States.


Now onto the performance:

My tests were done on my Dell E1505 with USB 2.0, Specs in signature, and the Windows XP Professional SP2 32 bit operating system

Here is the link to the CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT on Corsair's website:
http://www.corsair.com/products/voyager/default.aspx

and here is the datasheet:
http://www.corsair.com/_datasheets/CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT.pdf

Corsair states this image in their specsheet:
Continue reading to see if it is true or not



Here are my HDTUNE Tabs for the 16GB Flash Voyager GT









The drive performs pretty well. The minimum read speed is 27.7mb/sec and the maximum is 29mb/sec, averaging at 27.9mb/sec.
Access times are 1.1 milliseconds.
The Burst rate is 21.4 mb/sec
CPU Usage is 100% (not relevant, but I run world community grid, so my cpu is always at 100% load)

This test was done with hdtune version 2.55 running the “accurate” benchmark with an 8mb block size.



Crystalmark Real Life Benchmark Results:

I ran Crystalmark DISC Mark 2.2 on my drive, and well it performed okay
I ran the benchmark with a 5 x sampling size per run, and I did both 100mb and 1000mb tests. All Crystalmark benchmarks are located below in the comparison section


Now to the competition:
A run of the mill 4GB SanDisc Cruzer Mini:


Side by side comparison:




Conclusion:

As you can see, the Corsair Flash Voyager GT is faster on the reading side than the run of the mill SanDisc Cruzer. The Corsair card can easily do 10mb/sec higher bandwidth on the read side, but when you get to the writing benchmark, the tides turn to SanDisc. On the lower end, the SanDisc card actually writes files faster than the near 8x more expensive flash voyager GT, however on bulk file reading the Corsair shines.

If you actually read the whole thread, you will see that Corsair states that their cards are 3-4x faster than the competition.
In reality, on the read side the Corsair card is ~1.5x faster than the competition, near equal in speed on bulk writing, and the Corsair card is nearly 1/3 of the speed of the SanDisc on small file writing.

So Corsair's statement on their site is completely false. In order for their performance chart to be true, they would need to compare their series of drives to the slowest USB 2.0 drives.
The standard USB drive can do 20mb/sec in hdtune, so if their statement was true, their Flash Voyager GT series could do 60-80mb/sec and have three-four times the marks in crystalmark.

So I state with very high confidence that Corsair's performance chart labeled in their PDF is just a marketing scam to get the edge on their competition.

I did notice one difference in benchmarks, the 16GB flash voyager GT does perform better than its predecessors. The 2GB and 4GB drives both peaked around 20mb/sec, while the new 16GB model can push 30mb/sec. So their is a 1.5x performance gain their. I do not have the crystalmark files for the older 2GB and 4GB drives, but the 16GB does transfer files faster than they did.



Background and why I choose Corsair:

A little more than a year and a half ago I was searching for a flash drive. After much research I found that the Corsair flash voyager GT series were supposedly the fastest USB drives. Well at that time I bought a 2Gb drive. A month or so later I bought a 4Gb drive as well because I was pleased with the other drive.
Here is a hdtune of each:




Well what happened was I had my 2GB card and well I liked it alot it was fast and never gave me any problems. So I sold my 2Gb drive to my brother and I bought a 4GB drive. It is now a little after a year that I had my 4GB card. Well my trust in Corsair to deliver a quality product dropped as time went on and the USB head became looser and looser. Eventually the head was about to snap off and the drive was no longer recognized by my laptop. I filled an RMA to Corsair, and within a day or so everything was setup for RMA. I was very upset with the performance of the 4GB drive because the Corsair Datasheet said it was 3-4x faster than the competition. Well my run of the mill san disc card, which I bought before my flash voyager GT kept chugging along, not the fastest in the world but it worked. Well I noticed over the year that both drives literally performed almost identical to each other. The San Disc card was a $10 card and my 4GB flash voyager GT was a $70 card. After proving to Corsair that they used false advertisement to market their products, they upgraded my memory card from a 4GB to a 16GB model for free. So I sent my broken 4GB card back, and just today I received my 16GB Flash Voyager GT.
I am happy with the new card, but I sure hope that it lasts more than 1 year.
Luckily Corsair's warranty is a 10 year warranty on their USB memory cards.
I hope I do not need to make use of it again, but we will have to see how it holds up. This one is a bit thicker than the other one, so hopefully it lasts longer.


I must say Corsair has great customer support. I sent them a typed letter in the package with my broken memory card, and when they received the package, the woman in charge of RMA at Corsair sent me an email, and told me that she was concerned with my claim. Corsair did not want to make a bad impression, so they sent me a 16GB replacement model.

Props to Corsair for a great RMA service, its fast, reliable and the people at Corsair even read the letters you send with your damaged product

Corsair's product datasheets may be overly exaggerating the performance difference, but it is up to quality reviews to reveal the truth.


This has been a review by
K-TRON Komputing Corporation
All rights reserved

Thanks for reading,

K-TRON

 

Nice one K-TRON

 

I wonder if I can send in my 1 gb Flash Voyager and get a 16 gb =P

 

Awesome review K-TRON! I looked at this as one of my possible models when I was considering a purchase (the 8GB version) vs. the OCZ ATV Turbo (but that's hard to find and ended up to be too expensive) vs. Patriot XT (which I finally decided to purchase, due to it being slightly cheaper at the time and having similar performance - though I lost my HD Tune/CrystalDiskMark results somewhere). Just curious as I'm running my HD Tune again, how does block size affect HD Tune results and why did you choose 8MB?

edit: Patriot XT 8GB isn't as steady as yours (spikes fluctuate from 21.1 - 28.7MB/s), avg is 24.4MB/s w/ 1.0 ms access time.
CrystalDiskMark for 100MB shows 27.70 and 14.35 MB/s for sequential R/W - 1.5x faster than Corsair!
while 1000MB shows 26.91 and 13.27 MB/s for sequential R/W

 

Nice review, K-tron. I have an 8GB sandisk cruzer micro drive, and I was thinking of getting a bigger and faster one. The Corsair Voyager GT is supposedly the fastest flash drive out, and yet it's still marginally faster than the sandisk, so I think I'll pass, and just get an external hard drive.

 

thanks for the review repped

looks like a pregnant version of my 4gb voyager gt!

i cant wait till these 16 or 64 gb flash drives becomes cheap

btw, is it really necessary to scan flash drive with HDtune? have you ever find drives with bad block/s?

 

sgogeta4, Block size effects performance. SSD's like hard drives and flash devices are all better at transferring larger files than small ones. As in the Crystalmark results, this flash drive gets pretty much exponentially slower as file size decreases. Selecting the 8Mb or largest size offered by the program shows the maximum net speed of the drive. Crystalmark is handy because in one table you can see the speed of the drive in relation to large files, average sized files and small files.

Wobble987, I scan every storage device when I get it to make sure that it is performing properly, stable and safe to store my files on, before just using it. In this case the Corsair card shipped in perfect running order

Thanks all for reading,
It took me over 5 hours to make and write this review

K-TRON

 

Hello K-TRON, have you tried formatting the disk to NTFS? I notice that the write performance is very bad under NTFS. While copying files from my computer to the drive, the drive will stop transferring for a few seconds intermittently and continue again. I noticed this trend based on the transfer status window of Windows Vista. The progress bar of the transfer status window will stop for a while, then proceed to move again. When the progress stops, the transfer rate will not change. Besides that, Windows Explorer will sometimes stop responding for a moment until the transfer finishes though sometimes it responds again while transferring is still taking place. This happens on both read and write. Is there anything I can do to solve these problems? I just got this drive a few months ago. Thank you.

 

How did you format your drive into NTFS?
I do not have the option in Windows XP or in Server 2003

K-TRON

 

I am using Windows Vista and Windows 7. Both have the option to format the drive to NTFS. For Windows XP, you'll need to change the drive to the 'optimize for performance' option under the policies tab in device manager. The option to format the drive to NTFS will be available.

 

Thanks for that info ps89,
I went ahead and ran some tests
On the left you have NTFS file system and on the right is FAT32



The Corsair card is pretty much slower in data throughput across the boards, when formatted in NTFS.
However that benchmark does not show real life performance differences that ps89 mentioned.

So to prove the actual speed difference I ran my own benchmark using an ordinary stopwatch.

In real life, I made my own benchmark:
Moving my RPI data folder which is 3.06Gb and contains 1855 files, most of which are images of projects and small files, PDF’s etc.


Time to transfer to Corsair Flash Voyager GT:

FAT32 Optimized for Performance: 17 minutes 59 seconds
FAT32 Optimized for Quick Removal: 17 minutes 46 seconds
NTFS Optimized for Performance: 1 Hour 11 minutes and 26 seconds
NTFS Optimized for Quick Removal: Not an option for formatting. NTFS is only in Performance mode

As you can see Crystalmark is not picking up how terrible the drive is when it is formatted in NTFS. ~71 minutes versus ~18 minutes is a tremendous difference in time for copying files.
So if you have a USB flash drive formatted in NTFS I highly recommend formatting it in FAT32, it will perform much better for you. The whole "Optimizing for Performance" and "Optimizing for Quick Removal" do not show any fruition in terms of performance. There was only a 13 second difference in copying time, so you can format your USB flash drive in FAT32 in either way, and performance is identical.

K-TRON

 

Thanks for a lot for the detailed testings. The only way to transfer files larger than 4GB is to use the NTFS. But I guess I'll just have to stick with FAT32. The performance difference between both file systems is way too big.

 

now I know why I got 2 different cap sizes from corsair...to accommodate for the size difference on the 16gb GT.