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Got My Survivor Today!

No, this is not an entry about the Survivor Rap from Phua Chu Kang. This is an entry about my new Corsair Survivor (non-GT) 8GB USB flash drive that just arrived less than 3 hours ago. I’ve been waiting for this baby to arrive for almost an entire week, and naturally I’m excited.

If you’re wondering about what got me so excited, for one, it’s the price - I paid about RM 250 or £39 for my Survivor. Now, why on Earth would someone in their sane mind purchase something that costs more than 2.5x of any other fully-functional, albeit ordinary USB stick which can be purchased for less than RM 100?

Lo and behold the world’s most rugged USB flash drive:

The Survivor is encased in CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum, which provides the foundation for its extreme ruggedness. Needless to say, it is both shock resistant and water resistant up to 200 meters. Revealing the contents of the package, we have a Corsair dog tag and a USB extension cable along with the Survivor itself.

To use the Survivor requires one to unscrew one side of the casing. I cannot help to notice that Survivor is indeed built to precision as everytime I screw the cap back, it always ends up at the same spot.

There are tonnes of glorious reviews on the ruggedness of Survivor available on the Internet, most of it done by professional reviewers and thus, I shall skip the ruggedness test. For your convenience, I have provided links below to those reviews so that you can view them at your pleasure. Instead, I shall just mention in brief about the survivor instincts of Survivor:

• It survived the pressure test of being run over multiple times by a 2 tonne four-wheel drive.
• It passed the crucial washing machine and dryer test
• It still works perfectly after staying inside a cube of ice in the freezer for more than 12 hour
• It refuses to be cooked by boiling water

Although I skipped the ruggedness test, I did do a speed test to see the real world performance of Survivor. After all, what use does it do if it function like a giant tortoise when plugged into the USB port? Armed with a stopwatch, I conducted 3 tests:

1. Copying many MP3 files (total size 1.03 GB, average MP3 file of size 4 MB) from my computer to Survivor took 196 seconds - An average write speed of 5.38 MB/s
2. Copying one large AVI file (size 700 MB) into Survivor took 89 seconds - An average write speed of 7.87 MB/s
3. Copying one large AVI file (size 700 MB) from the Survivor into my laptop took 39 seconds - An average read speed of 17.94 MB/s

I don’t really have a yardstick to measure as this is the only flash drive that I have at the moment, but do feel free to test the speed of your flash drive and post comments below.

Official Site: Corsair Memory - Survivor

Reviews: Everything USB, Phoronix

Comparison Reviews: Core Computers, Driver Heaven

Some of the reviews above are for the Survivor GT version, which is a faster version of Survivor. However, mine is a non-GT version (GT version costs more than twice of the non-GTs, can’t afford them) and thus, the speed review is not a description of the Survivor that I currently own. Nevertheless, the ruggedness and everything else are the same for both editions.

As a final note, I’ve read Corsair’s support forum and they seems to have a great support for their product range. Did I mention that the Survivor comes with a 10-year warranty? This means that if there are problems with your Survivor even after using it for 2 years, they will replace them for free. :)