Corsair Survivor GT 32GB USB flash drive

It's a solid-feeling metal tube with either 32GB or 64GB capacity, and this new Corsair Survivor GT USB flash drive adds a welcome boost in transfer speeds.

NAND flash solid-state memory is quite a resilient thing, able to withstand a certain amount of shock and submersion in water unaided. But for the toughest of conditions, the Corsair Survivor GT features a heavy-duty screw-tight enclosure.

A milled-out aluminium cylinder keeps all the USB electronics and flash chips locked away inside, with a rubber O-ring to make the screwthread watertight. Corsair claims the Corsair Survivor GT enjoys water resistance to a depth of 200 metres (which we didn't test).

Unscrew the lipstick-like cover, and you'll find a more familiar-looking USB stick inside, with the tube's endcap supporting the flash memory like a dipstick. Once opened and in use, a little blue LED inside flickers for read/write activity. And the cap includes a lanyard hole drilled through its top. If you hang the Corsair Survivor GT around your neck or on a keyring, and the cover should come off because it's not been screwed on properly, at least you'll be left with the important half.

Making the overall package even more resilient are two rubber bumpers, one each end of the tube. The Corsair Survivor GT is no lightweight at 44g overall, or 25g for the business end. Docked to a PC's USB port, and with most of that weight. This can always avoided by using the supplied USB extender cable.

As well as being very robust, the Corsair Survivor GT can also claim to be one of the faster USB sticks on the market. Where many USB thumb drives are slow to write to, at around 8 or 9MB/s transfer speed, we saw figures of 11.2MB/s using the Simpli HD Tach 3 benchmark. And when reading data, the Survivor GT nearly made a round 30MB/s, actually recorded at 29.8MB/s. Random access was a typically quick sub-millisecond figure of 0.9ms.