Putting it to the test!

It is no doubt that the Flash Voyager GT is a fast USB drive, even though Corsair does not list any performance numbers.


Just plugging the drive in and copying a couple of files makes you wonder if that old drive you had really was as fast as you thought it was. Sometimes it is quite a revelation when you move from one generation to the next of computer hardware and the Flash Voyager GT really made us realise how slow some of our current flash drives were.

In a simple drag-and-drop test of a single 699MB the Flash Voyager GT took a mere 32 seconds to copy the file. Compare this to 1min 34sec for the older Flash Voyager and 1min 41sec for a SanDisk Cruzer Micro. Considering you have got 8GB at your disposal, it is not unthinkable that you will end up copying several large files like this onto the Flash Voyager GT.

Moving onto HD Tach it is quite easy to see why the Flash Voyager GT kicks butt, as it has an average read speed of 33.8MB/s. Compare this to 18.6MB/s for the older Flash Voyager and 17.7MB/s for the SanDisk Cruzer Micro and you quickly realise that we are talking about a really zippy drive here. The random access time is a mere 1.2ms compared to a massive 33.3ms for the Flash Voyager. However, the SanDisk Cruzer Micro actually beats the Flash Voyager GT here as it has a random access time of just 1ms. This does not really matter too much as you will not notice the 0.2ms delay in real-world application.

Oddly enough the CPU utilization is 11% for the Flash Voyager GT, which is much higher than both of the other two drives. This is worth noting if you are planning to use the Flash Voyager GT with an older computer, as you might not get the most out of it if it uses up too much of those precious CPU cycles. However, we doubt this is going to be an issue for potential buyers of the Flash Voyager GT since it is a premium performance product.


All three drives where tested with Windows Vista as a ReadyBoost drive, although the original Flash Voyager was deemed too slow as ReadyBoost is all about random access time rather than sustained speed. We tried using the Flash Voyager GT and the SanDisk Cruzer Micro with two different setups, but neither system showed any measurable performance difference.

This could well be because the system with the least amount of RAM had 1GB in it and ReadyBoost is really for systems with less than 1GB of RAM. To be honest, ReadyBoost seems to be more of a marketing gimmick right now than a real sensible performance enhancing option and you would be much better off getting some extra RAM for your computer.

We also plugged the Flash Voyager GT it into a DVD player with a USB port on it to see how well it worked to play movies from, and there were no problems whatsoever to use it for this.