USB storage devices have been used in everyday lives. To the humble removable device storage to save all of those files and documents quickly to one computer to another, to the more important role of being a ghost back up file in most enterprise computers and server an inexpensive way to keep a piece of mind in mass storage.
Well, we haven’t seen any of the high performance USB coupling devices in recent months, with the SDD drives already having stepped up the performance of reads and writes of the older HDDs making them run for their money, but they still haven’t an advantage on the prize per gigabyte ratio, but what we might see in jump of new architecture development to make SDD’s cheaper and more resistant to read and write degradation, we will see the increasing popularity of SDD’ to the mainstream market. But Corsair, with their high performance products like the voyager GT made a comeback of bringing larger 128GB SDD pen drive in to the market.
At the cutting-edge of removable storage reside pen-drives with 128GB-plus capacities, and we took a look at a 128GB USB pen-drive from Patriot just over two weeks ago. Clearly large on capacity and finished in a cool aluminium casing, we felt that the asking price of $380US put it too close to the speedier alternative of eSATA-connected SSDs.
The Flash Voyager GT 128 is presented in the now-familiar livery of the GT pen-drives. The ruggerdised casing is thicker than smaller-capacity drives’. A blue LED flashes when the drive’s being accessed by the host system. Corsair uses a dual-controller design to maximise the speed of the MLC NAND memory contained inside, and the company quotes peak read/write speeds of 32.6MB/s and 28MB/s, respectively. That, then, makes it one of the faster USB pen-drives available.
Clearly opting for speed over form, we’re somewhat bemused as to why Corsair hasn’t included an eSATA version – or even a double-ended model. USB2.0 is limited to around 35MB/s in real-world use; eSATA can skip along at 250MB/s-plus, putting the onus on the drive, not the interface. We make particular mention of this fact because folk who can drop £300 on a removable drive will, we feel, have access to boards/chassis with eSATA ports.
Corsair’s decision to debut a fast pen-drive is manifested in a much larger-than-normal model which, we reckon, brings eSATA-connected, caddy-housed SSDs very much into play as a viable alternative for on-the-go storage.
Looking at the $380US Corsair Flash Voyager GT 128 solely in relation to other USB pen-drives shows it in a positive light. Our tests show that peak read (33MB/s) and write speeds (26MB/s) are at the high-end of what current-generation USB drives can produce, helped on by the dual-controller design. The capacity, too, at 128GB, is massive, and the ruggerdised rubber housing will keep it safe from all but the most die-hard lunatics.