Corsair Flash Voyager LS 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

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The Corsair Voyager LS is a rather unique spin on the typical sliding USB flash drive design. Where standard drives slide into or out of the body of the drive, the LS carries a metal retainer that spins around the central point of the drive, revealing the USB 3.0 port.

The Corsair Flash Voyager LS has come to market in a number of capacities. These include a 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB model. Compatibility of these drives extend to all modern Windows operating systems, while also including Mac OS X and Linux support. Looking into the specifications for this drive, the only marketing information I could find on was it offers "USB 3.0 performance". Warranty is listed at a very solid five years.

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With the Voyager LS, Corsair went with a rather unique design. Here you can see the drive carries a metal retainer around the outside of the drive. At the top, the drive comes with a small lanyard and key ring attached.

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As you spin the retainer on the LS around, the USB 3.0 port appears from within the drive.

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The USB 3.0 port is colored blue, accordingly - no surprises here.

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Internally, the Flash Voyager LS shares the same PCB with the Voyager Slider. Here we have the Phison PS2251.

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The backside house a single NAND package at 128GB, which to me is rather impressive.

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 LS is factory formatted with the FAT32 file system, insuring compatibility between Windows and Macintosh computers. The usable capacity after formatting is 115GB.

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At this point, after knowing the internal components, I had a slight idea what the performance would look like. Above, we have 138 MB/s read and 30 MB/s reads.

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DiskBench landed the LS towards the bottom of our charts, but slightly quicker than the Slider, thanks to the additional capacity of our sample.

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More often than not price/performance is going to be the most important factor in determining what drive you decide to purchase. Above you can see the Flash Voyager LS does quite well in this area sliding into fifth position in our charts.

As with all products that come through the test lab here at TweakTown, I like to spend a bit of time with them to get a good feel for the drive. In testing the everyday use of the drive, I found the Voyager LS really easy to use in situations where you only have a single hand free. On the other hand, I found that the durability of the drive is in question. The reason for this is the metal retainer that controls the motion of the USB 3.0 port tends to slide off its pivot point at times, leaving you to spend time snapping it back in place.

Performance of the drive was quite good with sequential reads, where we topped 150 MB/s. Sequential writes, however, were pretty low for a flash drive in this day and age. Even with the slower than normal write speeds, the price/performance chart tells the story. Here we have the drive at the top of our charts thanks to Corsairs aggressive pricing.

Pricing for the 128GB Corsair Flash Voyager LS sits at $89.99 with the smaller 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models at $15.99, $25.99 and $44.99, respectively.

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