Corsair Flash Survivor Stealth 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

Corsair is well-known in the PC component industry, making everything from chassis and power supplies down to solid state drives and of course USB flash drives. It is pretty safe to say you could build an entire PC with Corsair components with the obvious exceptions of motherboard, CPU and video card. That said, today we will be taking a look at one of the entries into Corsair's portfolio from CES 2013.

The Corsair Survivor Stealth is a rather unique flash drive, in that it uses an entire aluminium sleeve to protect the flash components rather than a cap. The Stealth as I will call it from here on out is said to be capable of 85MB/s read and 70MB/s write and comes in three flavours -16GB, 32GB and the model we have for testing here today, 64GB. Compatibility of the flash drive extends as far as Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 along with Mac OS X and Linux 2.6+.

At first glance the Stealth is a sleek looking drive, as well as being the longest drive we have in house. As far as weight, the drive weighed in at 42 grams on our scale.

The back of the drive shows the branding of the drive very prominently across the aluminium shell.

Unscrewing the waterproof cap, we were able to pull out the drive and look over it. As you will notice there is no capacity branding anywhere on the drive. There is however a blue LED for indicating drive activity at the far left of the drive.

The Stealth, being a USB 3.0 drive, has its port colored blue.

Pulling the drive apart was rather simple and thus we have pictures to share. Here we can see the flash controller and 32GB NAND package.

The backside of the drive houses another 32GB NAND package for our total of 64GB. Each of these modules or packages as I call them, are made by SanDisk.

The flash controller is branded eEver EV266H and is made by Etron, and it is a two channel controller that complies with ONFI 2.2 specifications.

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. To start my benchmarking procedure I secure erased the Corsair Survivor, as I do all drives I test.

The formatted capacity of the 64GB Stealth is 59.6GB in Windows. The drive comes preformatted from Corsair with the FAT32 file system.

As I stated in the beginning of the review, the Stealth has marketing specifications of 85MB/s read and 70MB/s write. Above you can see our ATTO results were way above marketing with a peak of 191MB/s read and 79MB/s write.

CrystalDiskMark produced similar results with sequential testing showing 179MB/s read and 87MB/s write. At QD32 the Stealth was capable of 19MB/s, one of the faster drives when dealing with queue depths.

Our first DiskBench test showed the Stealth capable of transferring our photos at 36MB/s.

Our videos transferred a bit quicker at 78MB/s.

The Stealth was capable of moving our Windows 7 install over at 77MB/s taking just 52 seconds to do so.

Looking over our chart above you can see the Stealth isn't the fastest drive we have tested.

The Stealth from Corsair is a rather unique drive as I stated in the opening comments. Corsair has taken the "Survivor" branding to the extreme, crafting the casing for the drive out of anodized aircraft grade aluminium, even adding an EPDM waterproof seal, making sure your drive stays safe in waters up to 200 meters. Durability of the drive also has high marks in our book as we actually had the chance to put the 40G shock proofing to the test, dropping the drive off our balcony at CES 2013, as you can see in the video embedded below.

Performance of the drive was surprising in the least. Marketing specifications depicted that the drive was capable of 85/70, but in our testing we blew those numbers out getting 179MB/s read and 87MB/s write in CDM.

Pricing of this drive is quite favourable as well. I was able to find this drive on the net at a very comfortable $59.99 for the 64GB model, putting the drive under 1$ per GB. If my memory serves me right, this may be the first drive under the 1$ per mark in our testing. Add to this the five year warranty Corsair serves up and the excellent durability, and come out having one of the best drives price vs. performance on the market today.