The 8 GB model shown here marks Corsair’s new line of ultra-durable flash storage drives. Generally the drives come with lots of stickers, but I’m of the mind that if the device looks good without embellishment, one should let it be what it is.

While the 16 GB and 32 GB were both tempting offerings, but at $63 dollars shipped by ZipZoomFly.com was clearly the best value. The 8 GB make roughly 16 times the capacity of the drive it’s replacing, so I’m not too worried that I shouldn’t have gotten one of the larger models.

The construction is rugged, even a little imposing. To my eye, it looks a bit like the sort of device the evil villain would manipulate in some way to reveal a glowing green glass vial of something hazardous. Within the first minutes of having the drive, I removed the stickers that label it as a Corsair Survivor. The slightly spattered stencil-like “SURVIVOR” logo doesn’t really fit the smooth anodized aluminum shell if you ask me.

Larger than your average drive, the Corsair Survivor sizes up more or less equally with a full roll of nickels. It feels lighter than you would expect for how solid it looks, but you definitely know you’re handling some hardware. When opened, the drive looks as though it’s probably just glued into the screw-on cap rather than being a solid piece of aluminum. One molded piece would be stronger, but the glued plastic feels very solid. I pried against it for several minutes to remove the last of the goo from the adhesive of the label and never felt as though I was going to damage the drive or break it loose from the cap.

The LED built into the drive is an exceptionally bright blue. You’ll definitely know if the drive is operating if you’ve got a clear view of the machine it’s plugged into.

Access speeds speeds seemed acceptably fast to me. My previous drive was a three year old 512 MB SanDisk, so anything would probably seem blazing fast to me.

Bundled with TrueCrypt

When I plugged the drive into a USB port I was surprised to see AntiVir throwing several heuristic warnings and one virus signature match on the drive. All the warnings and detections were caused by non-essential auto run files to launch TrueCrypt installer. All were easily deleted without breaking any functionality of the drive that I’m aware of.

The TrueCrypt interface was surprisingly good and I easily set up a 512 MB encrypted volume on the drive to use for all my deep dark secrets and my Swiss account numbers. The next time I’m on an international flight and get cornered by the bad guy, I can feel comfortable turning my drive over, I guess. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get much use out of the ability to securely store lots of files, but at present I’m using it to store backups of all my server user names and passwords in case I need to migrate systems, etc.

If nothing else I can say that I got a bit of education about the world of file encryption with TrueCrypt. Though I have nothing to substantiate the opinion, I think the folks who wrote/write/maintain TrueCrypt definitely know what they’re doing. I’m not exactly sure what a TwoFish Serpent Whirlpool encryption scheme is all about, but it definitely sounds complicated and hard to crack. If you’re interested in protecting the key codes to your off-shore intercontinental ballistic party poppers, check out TrueCrypt.

All In All

Overall, I’m very happy with the drive. I won’t have to worry as much about handing it over to a consulting client and having the disk be too full to copy the necessary files. I’ll do my best to put the drive through it’s paces, and I’ll update this post if I manage to break the drive or cause it to malfunction.

And of course, if you’re into massive flash drive storage capacity, there’s always the 16 GB and 32 GB alternatives.
Corsair Survivor 8 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 16 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 32 GB at ZipZoomFly.com