Corsair Flash Voyager GTX - Near SSD Performance in your Pocket?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
727 words · ~3 min read
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normally I'll get a request from a vendor to do a USB thumb drive review
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and I'm
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like but every once in a while the product notes will say something
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outlandish like SSD performance now in
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convenient travel size and I kind of go okay send it over so here we are welcome
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to my video about the flash Voyager GTX from
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Corsair
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the Jazz mini phone and tablet stand from Cooler Master is now available in a
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variety of cool colors from these great retailers click now to learn more now
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it's no secret that a USB thumb drive and an SSD are not fundamentally that
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different there's an interface like SATA or USB there's a controller chip and
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there's Nan flash so why does comparing the performance of an SSD to your
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typical USB drive feel about like pitting Batman against a one-legged dog
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in a cage match what are the actual differences great question first up is
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Flash chip quality betterand is faster and lasts for more right Cycles but is
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also much more expensive second is parallelization ssds have more flash
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chips to read from and write to and accessing more chips at the same time
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within a drive is kind of like accessing more drives at a time in raid zero
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within a PC and third is controller complexity SSD controllers are much
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faster and use more advanced reading and writing algorithms to coax the best
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possible performance and Longevity out of the attached flash so that third
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point is what Corsair changed they went and put an SSD controller in this thumb
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drive's attractive metal housing with a little cap on it and stuff because while
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capacities for these drives have increased dramatically over the past few
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years this one's 256 gigs performance
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hasn't scaled in quite the same fashion so that massive amount of storage that
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you can carry around in your back pocket becomes impractical for large files
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anyway because it takes so long to copy C them back and forth okay then so how
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does this one perform then lus well great question again we did three
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different real world tests a single 6 gig file transfer a 1 gig single file
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transfer and a multi file transfer of over 2,1 megab photos and the answer is
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about as expected for very small files the better controller gives the Voyager
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GTX a real Edge on more traditional drives uh in terms of right speeds but
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makes less of a difference for reads with our medium-size single file test we
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noticed that it's got this weird fast bursting behavior that allowed it to
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read a 1 gig file faster than we could even start and stop the timer and then
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write at pretty much the same speed as our SSD leaving a more traditional even
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performance oriented USB 3 Drive behind and hanging right up there with an SSD
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and finally in our large file test the Voyager GTX landed squarely between the
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other options for rights and much closer to the SSD for reads making the
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conclusion for this drive actually very straightforward is it as fast as an SSD
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no not exactly but it's still super cool
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and if you want to carry a bunch of data around with you in a form factor that's
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more convenient than an SSD on a dongle but less convenient perhaps than a slim
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drive that doesn't interfere with the surrounding ports then the Voyager GTX
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is your middle ground in terms of the actual size and shape as well as in
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terms of performance thanks for watching guys like or dislike the video according
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to your feelings as always the link to the pricing for this product is in the
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video description along with a link to our Forum where you can discuss it away from the typical YouTube comment rigar
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roll and also in the video description is a support link you can buy a cool
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t-shirt like this one become a contributor or even just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our
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affiliate code all that stuff helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and
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as always don't forget to subscribe if you haven't
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already he