Corsair Flash Voyager Slider 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

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In this day and age, flash drives come in many different sizes and shapes. In addition to each drive's form factor, you will also find different methods of protecting the USB port. In this area, we have two types of "sliders" - those that have the USB port slide out of a single piece frame, and those that have the body slide through a retainer.

The Flash Voyager Slider uses the latter of the two sliding methods, offering supreme protection for the USB port. In doing my standard research for this review, I found that Corsair has the Slider marketed at 85 MB/s read and 70 MB/s write. Compatibility of the Flash Voyager Slider extends to modern Windows OS's, Mac OS X and Linux. Warranty of the Flash Voyager Slider is listed a very solid five years.

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The Voyager Slider uses a two piece plastic design. As stated previously, the body of the drive slides through a retainer to reveal the USB 3.0 port. On the top of the drive, we have an included LED for drive activity.

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The USB 3.0 port is properly colored to denote its capabilities.

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The Flash Voyager Slider utilizes the Phison PS2251 controller.

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On the backside of the PCB, we found a single NAND package at 64GB.

One of the lesser-known features of running Microsoft's new operating system Windows 8 is the native capability of USB Attached SCSI or UASP. In benchmarking flash drives, we utilize ATTO Disk Benchmark followed by DiskBench and our custom set of real-world data, and is by far the most important comparison when looking for a flash drive for everyday use.

Recently we have added our very own Price vs. Performance charts for both read and write performance of each drive, for these charts we take the average sequential performance over five runs and divide it by the price per GB. All pricing information is updated before a new drive is added and is taken from certified channel retailers such as Newegg or Amazon.

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The Corsair Flash Voyager Slider is factory formatted with the FAT32 file system, insuring compatibility between Windows and Macintosh computers. The usable capacity after formatting is 57.6GB.

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ATTO results were promising for the Voyager Slider. Here we see the drive peak at a rate of 151 MB/s read and 22 MB/s write.

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DiskBench had the Slider capable of 19 MB/s writing our 4GB ISO file, 25 MB/s on the AVCHD files and 21 MB/s moving RAW images.

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Where the Flash Voyager Slider excelled was price/performance. Here we find the drive near the top of our charts, thanks to its extremely affordable price and decent sequential performance.

The Corsair Flash Voyager Slider is a durable compact flash drive that offers ample performance when reading from the drive, but lacks slightly in the write department. As far as durability is concerned, the sliding form factor offers plenty in this regard, but does take a little more effort when attempting to use it one-handed.

Performance of the drive was acceptable in sequential read, where we found it capable of 150 MB/s. Write results however, weren't too friendly to the Slider, topping out at 22 MB/s.

Pricing at this time for the 64GB capacity is set at $44.99. At this price, it certainly makes the Slider a tempting purchase and one of the best when it comes to price/performance.

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