Corsair Flash Voyager GTX Promises SSD-Level Performance
by Jarred Walton on June 2, 2014 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Corsair
- USB 3.0
- Flash Drive
- Computex 2014
When you need an easy way to carry around a bunch of data you generally have two options: for fast storage you need an SSD with some sort of USB 3.0 (or eSATA) adapter; otherwise you’re stuck with a small and portable USB stick that likely has much lower overall performance. There have been a few companies offering faster USB stick alternatives, but of course the price tends to scale rapidly. Corsair is offering another entrant into this category with their new Flash Voyager GTX, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities.
In terms of raw specs, the Flash Voyager GTX boasts read/write speeds of up to 450/350 MB/s. The drives feature support for USB Attached SCSI, SMART monitoring, and TRIM. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of information still missing; I’d like to see performance numbers for transferring lots of small files, and random I/O would be interesting as well; there’s no specific mention of the controller or NAND type either. That means we’ll have to wait for a full review before we can truly compare performance with that of SSDs.
Given the storage capacity these are obviously slightly larger USB stick enclosures. Availability is scheduled for July, with an MSRP of $120 for the 128GB model and $200 for the 256GB model.
Source: Corsair
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
16 Comments
View All Comments
tokyojerry - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
100% agree! Especially if you want to do some video post production while mobile. (see my above comment to JarredWalton)Morawka - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
are you kidding me? all of us with tablets would love this fast storage to replace crappy emmc storage solutions.name99 - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
This is a REALLY difficult sort of product to sell because every competitor (and you yourself, Corsair) have pissed in the well of thumb drives. We've all seen the advertising promising 10x speed, 100x speed, millionx speed, USB3 speed, blah blah --- and yet thumb drives of this sort are uniformly disappointing.If *I* were in Best Buy and saw thus product my reaction would probably be
(a) you're lying about the read (and especially the write) speed AND
(b) you doubtless suck in some way that's not obvious but is there --- random access writes are awful, or there's some tiny cache that runs fast but everything else runs slow, or the speeds you advertise are the speed of your USB controller not the speed of the flash it is hooked up to, or something.
Point is --- to sell something like this, very different and promising more but charging more --- it helps to have a trusted brand, someone that you more or less believe would not lie to you. Corsair does not have that --- it's not that they have a reputation for lying, but they don't have a reputation for standing out in their truth telling.
Which means, I suspect, that few people are going to be reckless enough to pay the extra cost on the hope that, this time, the claims of a fast thumb drive aren't just lies, or technically true but in a way that's not useful.
FaaR - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
One thing I don't get with most of these flash sticks is why they have to be so bloody thick and wide. Because of this, they obstruct adjacent ports. You pretty much can't use them on a rear of a PC without several USB ports becoming inaccessible, perhaps even other ports as well (ethernet, video and so on would be terrible.)Sucks. So yeah, it's fast, I get it. However high-performance USB3 sticks have been out for years now and they're showing no signs of shrinking. It's lazy and dumb that they remain so damn huge still after all this time.
milkman001 - Monday, June 2, 2014 - link
Yeah I've had a similar experience with my Extreme Sandisk, which gets SSD like performance. Use front USB ports and risk smacking and it accidentally--took me 2 weeks to do this, use the back and it won't fit w/o removing something else.Best bet is to get a small USB 3 cable. Which was actually pretty hard to find. Shortest I could buy was 10 cm:
http://bit.ly/U7NAYt
hojnikb - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Yeah, thats true. It's not like they can't make a small flash drive (Its already possible to stuff 128GB or even 256GB on to a single package), problem is, that no one has a decent native usb3 controller. So they use something from ssd (sandforce for example) and a sata-usb bridge. That obviously takes space and a bulky flash drive comes out as a result.