Corsair Flash Survivor (32GB)

Can Take Punishment No USB Thumb Drive Should Face

Flash Survivor is an extremely durable, water resistant, drop-tested flash USB memory drive. By design it is perfect for transporting valuable data such as personal files, photos and applications without having to worry about damage or loss of data due to the elements.

The Corsair Flash Survivor (32GB) USB drive has military written all over it. We tested the 32GB Survivor, which costs a heart-stopping $229.99 list—but that works out to $7.19 per GB, a much better deal than the 4GB version at $12.50 per GB, if you care to look at it that way. The Survivor also has 8GB and 16GB versions.

When the cap is on, the drive looks like a steel roll of Life Savers. The drive it-self is a modest 65mm by 11mm by 8mm (HWD), which means it fits most USB ports without a problem, but the final 13mm at the base of the drive—the end opposite the USB connector—is as large in diameter as the cap (22mm at the widest spot). How impervious is the Survivor? Corsair says the drive can go as deep underwater as 200 meters. The Survivor isn’t big on extras. The chain fits through a small hole in the cap so you can wear the drive around your neck, but it does nothing to tether the cap and drive together. That’s a shame, since this drive is so dependent on its cap for its vaunted protection. Wearing the drive around your neck isn’t the most comfortable thing. Installed on the drive is TrueCrypt 4.3, which works under Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. The software can encrypt an entire storage device, like the Survivor USB drive, so that only the user who set it up can get access. Though it’s not included on the Survivor drive, there’s also a Mac OS X version of TrueCrypt that you can download from the site. The drive works with Mac OS 9 on up, and even Linux 2.4 and up.

Though not abysmal, the Survivor’s performance—a 21.7-megabyte-per-second (MBps) read speed and 10.8-MBps write—ranks toward the bottom (in both read and write) among the USB flash drives I’ve recently reviewed. The Editors’ Choice SanDisk Cruzer Contour delivered a 25.7-MBps read speed—which was not even the best in our last USB drive roundup—and a 16.9-MBps write speed.