At a look
Professional’s Score
Execs
- Good 10Gbps efficiency
- Small type issue
- Rugged, weatherproof casing
Cons
- On the gradual facet for 10Gbps
- Not IP licensed
Our Verdict
Corsair’s Flash Survivor Stealth SSD marries a USB follow 10Gbps/NVMe pace, then weatherproofs and ruggedizes the entire deal. We prefer it.
Worth When Reviewed
This worth will present the geolocated pricing textual content for product undefined
Finest Pricing As we speak
Worth When Reviewed
$154.99
Finest Costs As we speak: Corsair Flash Survivor 1TB SSD
$143.99
The Corsair Survivor Stealth may look like a ruggedized, weatherprooofed, trail-tested chapstick. Actually, it’s an armored 10Gbps USB SSD that’s considerably sooner than your common thumb drive. The truth is, the internals are NVMe, so efficiency undoubtedly leans in that course, if to not the identical diploma as bigger exterior 10Gbps SSDs.
What are the Corsair Survivor Stealth’s options?
The Survivor Stealth is an roughly 3-inch lengthy, corrugated black cylinder that’s round an inch throughout at its widest factors — these being the comfortable rubber grips at both finish of the unit. Principally, it’s a sturdy steel tube with a USB thumb drive sealed securely inside. Flip the top cap that has a lanyard gap and also you free the affixed drive from its protecting sheath.
Although the drive isn’t IP rated (Ingress Safety — an costly course of), I’ve little question it’s as water- and dust-proof as any drive you’ll discover. I ran water over it vigorously in a sink , and nary a bead of moisture entered the tube. Being an SSD, it’s additionally almost impervious to shock, and I dropped it a number of instances from 8 ft to check that concept. No points.
Additional studying: Finest exterior drives
Whether or not it could survive being run over by a automobile, I’m not sure and I don’t typically check merchandise in that vogue. Nevertheless, given the form it’s not out of the query.
Whereas the Survivor Stealth is a 10Gbps, USB 3.0, Kind-A connector thumb drive, its internals are NVMe. Due to that, its efficiency is extra akin to that of the exterior SSDs we overview, than that of your garden-variety USB thumb drive.
Until you’re actually pinching pennies go together with the 128GB or bigger Survivor Stealth for finest worth.
Not an actual criticism, however I’d wish to see a Survivor that floats and is rendered in vibrant colours. Drop this in water and it sinks (which may very well be good or dangerous), and black generally is a very onerous shade to identify in lots of environments. Perhaps the Aqua-Survivor?
How a lot is the Corsair Survivor Stealth?
The Survivor Stealth is accessible in $20/32GB, $25/64GB, $30/128GB, $55/256GB, $100/512GB flavors in addition to the $155/1TB model I examined. That’s roughly 62.5 cents, 39 cents, 23 cents, 21.5 cents, 19.5, and 15.5 cents per gigabyte, respectively. Yup, the worth begins with the 128GB mannequin.
Until you’re actually pinching pennies go together with the 128GB or bigger Survivor Stealth.
How briskly is the Corsair Survivor Stealth?
In artificial benchmarks and with small quantities of information, the 1TB Survivor Stealth carried out effectively for a 10Gbps thumb drive SSD. That mentioned, it couldn’t match the SK Hynix Tube T31, which continues to be by far the quickest USB thumb drive we’ve examined.
Observe that the PNY Professional Elite V2 within the charts was a 256GB mannequin, which partially explains its slower efficiency. It’s additionally excluded from the 450GB write chart for that cause.
The Teamgroup C212 is a 5Gbps product, with expectedly slower outcomes. It’s, nevertheless, a faster-than-average thumb drive and a great comparability of fundamental 5Gbps versus 10Gbps efficiency — therefore its inclusion.
The Survivor Stealth was a lot nearer to the top-rated Tube T31’s efficiency in CrystalDiskMark 8’s random write exams.
Nevertheless, our 1TB Survivor Stealth did decelerate slightly quickly throughout our real-world 48GB transfers, indicating a small quantity of NAND allotted as secondary cache.
The excellent news is that it’s nonetheless writing at round 275MBps off cache, which isn’t the worst we’ve seen from an SSD by a protracted shot.
The 450GB write slowed down early and drastically, to the identical 275MBps — taking up half-hour. That’s hardly as tragic because the 5Gbps Teamgroup C212’s 125MBps took over 50 minutes. Once more, the Tube T31 stays unchallenged when it comes to USB stick efficiency among the many drives we’ve examined.
General, the Survivor Stealth’s efficiency is greater than sufficient for many duties, and much better than the common thumb drive. That mentioned, its major attraction is its ruggedness and weatherproofing.
Do you have to purchase the Corsair Survivor Stealth?
When you’ve got the necessity for a super-rugged USB stick that’s considerably sooner than the 400MBps/5Gbps commodity varieties you discover in abundance, then the Survivor Stealth is just about the most effective factor going. And as I mentioned, regardless of the dearth of IP certification, it ought to maintain up very effectively to abuse and the weather.
Then again, in case you’re purely in efficiency, contemplate the SK Hynix Tube T31, which additionally prices considerably much less at round $90 for 1TB.
