Corsair 4GB and 8GB Voyager Mini USB Flash Drive Review

Benchmarking The Voyager Mini

I tested the Corsair Flash Voyager Mini on an ASUS S62J ‘white box’ notebook with a Core Duo T2500 @ 2.0GHz. The Removable Storage test found in SiSoft Sandra Lite XII was used to get read and write performance numbers of this USB flash drive and several others that I have tested over time on the same notebook.

The Corsair Flash Voyager Mini 4GB was found to have data transfer rates of up to 17MB/sec read and 3MB/sec write. These performance numbers are not all that impressive, but the drive was designed for size and not performance. The Corsair Flash Voyager Mini 8GB was just slightly slower than the 4GB version, but not enough to be concerned.

On the 64MB file test the Corsair Flash Voyager Mini 4GB does a little better and was at 5MB/sec write speeds and 19MB/sec when it came to read performance. This is the lowest write speed of the nine USB Flash drives we have tested on this laptop, but the Corsair Flash Voyager Mini 8GB is a different story! The read performance was nearly 31MB/sec with the write performance coming in at 9MB/sec on the 8GB version of the Voyager Mini! This is nearly twice as much throughput when compared to the 4GB version and re-testing both the drives showed no difference in performance numbers.

Taking a closer look at each Corsair Flash Voyager Mini USB drive we can see an obvious difference in the design between the two models. The Chips-on-Board used on both drives are clearly from different sources, so the performance difference is a direct result in the different components. Between the two it seems the 4GB Mini does better with small file sizes and the 8GB Mini does better with larger file sizes.