Toughness:
During some mild abuse doled out to the Survivor GT, I found that it was definitely tough, but some things were worth mentioning.
The first is that when the Survivor GT was dropped, tossed, or otherwise made an impact with another hard surface, it rarely hit on either of the shock dampening collars. It seems to be weighted so that it hits on the exposed aluminum ends, making these collars seem to be more about appearance than protection. But, these collars may come in handy if something is dropped onto the drive while laying on its side.
When the drive does make impact with a hard surface on its aluminum ends, it can easily scratch or chip if the surface is rough enough (like stone or concrete). While the housing may get marked up, the key is that the drive itself is protected, and scars only add character.
As a final test of the toughness, the Survivor GT got a few baths. First it was sent through the wash in the pocket of a pair of cargo pants; in addition to coming out no worse for wear, it now had a mountain fresh scent. Since it might not have actually been submerged in the washing machine, I then let it soak in a cup of water for a while. After a bit of drip drying, I opened it up and it still worked just fine.
Testing:
Testing the Corsair Flash Survivor GT 8GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive will consist of comparing its performance in several tests to another 8GB USB flash drive, the OCZ Technology Mega-Kart. The two drives were connected to USB 2.0 ports found on a system with the following components:
» IWILL ZMAXdp Dual Opteron Small Form Factor Barebones System
» 2x AMD Opteron 270 Dual Core 2.0 GHz processors
» 2GB (2x1024MB) Corsair 3-3-3-8 ECC 400 MHz Registered DDR memory
» Buslink DVDRW optical drive
» Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA Hard Drive
» Windows XP Professional SP2 (current)
The following list details the tests to be executed:
» HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0
» HD Tune 2.53
» Real World Testing
HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0:
The first test conducted was Simpli Software's HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0 benchmark. This test provides information about the drive being tested, and the graph below details the random access time, the sequential write rate, the sequential read rate, and the burst rate of the two flash drives tested. Lower values are desirable for random access time, while higher values are better for sequential write rate, sequential read rate, and burst rate.
The original review of the OCZ Technology Mega-Kart revealed that it was quite slow at writing (or accessing) data, and being matched up against the Survivor GT confirms that. The Corsair product puts up much more impressive numbers in these categories. Despite the massive disparity in the first two portions of this benchmark, the read and burst rates were identical and quite respectable.
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