Corsair 16GB Flash Voyager USB 3.0 Review

Free Space and Final Thoughts

Taking a look at the capacity of the Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB USB 3.0 drive we see that in Windows, there is 14.9 GB available to the user as reported by Windows.

Corsair officially launched their first USB 3.0 Flash drives back on May 19th, 2011, but for some reason the company didn’t send any out to review. Usually when a company doesn’t offer or want to send products out to reviewers it’s not a good sign. In this situation we heard it was because Corsair wasn’t happy with the performance of the drive and that it wasn’t that impressive. For example the original Flash Voyager 16GB drive went by model number CMFVY3-16GB and was rated as having up to 70 MB/s read and 19 MB/s write speeds. Not too earth shattering by any means, but for $19.99 after rebate it’s not a bad value.

On September 9th, 2011 we received a press release that announced new high-speed USB 3.0 Flash drives by Corsair. This means that Corsair has released their ‘second generation’ of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives. What it looks like is that Corsair changed some internal components like the MLC NAND Flash inside to improve performance. The new Flash Voyager 16GB drive goes by model number CMFVY3S-16GB and has improved speed ratings of 79 MB/s read and 21 MB/s write speeds. This is an improvement of ~13% on read speeds and ~11% on write speed. Not bad as the price remains $19.99 after rebate, so you are getting better performance at the same cost! For those that like to know price per GB you are looking at $1.25 per GB.

The performance of the 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager was inline with what Corsair said it would be. With benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark we found 81 MB/s read speeds and 22 MB/s write speeds on a USB 3.0 connection. The read speed of 81 MB/s is nice, but the write speed left us wanting a little more. Just for fun we tried this drive on the USB 2.0 port on the same test system and saw that it was hitting 35 MB/s read and 22 MB/s write speeds. This clearly shows that the write speed is drive limited and you’ll get no write performance gain by moving to USB 3.0 port. That slightly defeats the purpose of a USB 3.0 device, but at least once the data is on the drive you can quickly move it off! If write speed is important to you, then you should check out the first generation 32GB Flash Voyager as it is rated at 70 MB/s read and 39 MB/s write for $50.98 shipped or the Flash Voyager GT as the 32GB version is rated at 135 MB/s read and 41 MB/s write for $59.99 shipped. By moving up to either of those models you’ll get twice the capacity and nearly twice the write speed for just over twice the price.

The Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB USB 3.0 drive is pretty solid and we like the durable rubber housing that has been in use for years and proven to be reliable. Even though the drive is SuperSpeed USB 3.0 it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and even USB 1.1, so you don’t have to worry about it working on older computers as long as a USB port is present. Corsair places a five year warranty on the Flash Voyager USB 3.0 series, so the only thing you really need to worry about is keeping your data backed up in the event that something goes wrong.

We have no issues with this product and highly recommend it to someone that wants to try out a cost effective mainstream USB 3.0 Flash drive!

Legit Bottom Line: The Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0 16GB Flash drive features awesome read performance and the price is hard to beat!