How a USB 3.0 Flash Voyager Changed My Life

I recently spent a week out in sunny Monterey, California for Corsair corporate training. It was great fun and it’s always refreshing to see all the people in from around the globe that make Corsair great.

In the midst of all the grueling training sessions and team building activities, I actually stumbled across a great example of the practical advantages of one of our products. Benchmarks are great but an example of every day usage is even better in many cases. Here is how a USB 3.0 flash drive literally changed my life.

USB 3.0 is slowly but surely becoming the standard for new devices and is being implemented on a growing number of motherboards. Of course that means that we are increasing our offerings of USB 3.0 flash drives. Meet our fastest UFD, the Flash Voyager® GT USB 3.0 flash drive.

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Thi La, our Vice President of Memory Products at Corsair, took a lot of great pictures during the training sessions. By the end of the week she had amassed a folder of pictures and materials that was over four GB. I needed to get this folder onto my notebook so that we could assemble a slideshow to be seen during lunch. The problem was that we had less than 15 minutes to do this. All the CEOs and Ps and VPs and PMs etc were waiting and I was racing the clock.

Luckily for me, Thi had copied this folder to a Flash Voyager GT 3.0 64GB and I just happened to have a USB 3.0 port on my notebook. We transferred that file in a flash! I know that is a bad pun, but I could not pass it up. So, I got the slideshow done just in time and this was due in part to the time saved by using a fast drive for the task and transferring over 4GB of data in under 2 minutes.

Everyone was happy and the Flash Voyager played a large part in that. I’m not sure I would have been finished on time if I was still using my trusty Flash Survivor GT 8GB which is a USB 2.0 SLC based flash drive. The Survivor GT SLC based 2.0 drive was one of the fastest USB 2.0 drives ever made and I use it almost daily. But, I was astonished at how much faster a USB 3.0 drive was.

This inspired me to do a bit of benchmarking and see just how our older generation speed king flash drive stacked up against the new USB 3.0 device. I started by cleaning both drives using diskpart and formatting them both FAT32.

Just FYI, you get this pesky message if you plug a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 port. Save yourself the trouble. Trust me, you are going to want a USB 3.0 drive if you use your portable storage frequently.

In the spirit of fairness, I decided to test first using both drives on a USB 2.0 port. Here’s the ATTO result showing the Survivor GT USB 2.0 result on the left and the Voyager GT 3.0 result on the right. Even on a USB 2.0 port, the Voyager GT 3.0 drive is noticeably faster than the Survivor GT.

Predictably, the Flash Voyager GT 3.0 really stretches its advantage on a USB 3.0 port. The advantage in speed is phenomenal.

Using both drives on the 3.0 ports really illustrates just how beneficial it is to use a USB 3.0 device on a USB 3.0 port. I used my file from the Sales Conference to replicate the time I sat beside Thi waiting on those files to transfer. I timed each run with a stopwatch.

I am so glad I did not use a USB 2.0 drive or a USB 2.0 port. The Voyager GT 3.0 on a USB 3.0 port absolutely slaughters the other options I had, and saved time allowing me impress everyone waiting on the slideshow.

Obviously, the USB 3.0 standard is an improvement over the aging USB 2.0. Here, we’ve demonstrated some real world advantages to using a machine with USB 3.0 ports and a really fast USB 3.0 flash drive. Getting the slideshow done on short notice did not result in a pay raise but everyone did appreciate the effort. So, get yourself a USB 3.0 Flash Voyager GT. It may just change your life as it did mine.