Corsair Flash Survivor Stealth review: A fast SSD disguised as a USB drive

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The Corsair Survivor Stealth might appear to be a ruggedized, weatherprooofed, trail-tested chapstick. In actuality, it’s an armored 10Gbps USB SSD that’s significantly faster than your average thumb drive. In fact, the internals are NVMe, so performance definitely leans in that direction, if not to the same degree as larger external 10Gbps SSDs.

What are the Corsair Survivor Stealth’s features?

The Survivor Stealth is an approximately 3-inch long, corrugated black cylinder that’s around an inch across at its widest points — those being the soft rubber grips at either end of the unit. Basically, it’s a sturdy metal tube with a USB thumb drive sealed securely inside. Turn the end cap that has a lanyard hole and you free the affixed drive from its protective sheath.

Though the drive isn’t IP rated (Ingress Protection — an expensive process), I have no doubt it’s as water- and dust-proof as any drive you’ll find. I ran water over it vigorously in a sink , and nary a bead of moisture entered the tube. Being an SSD, it’s also nearly impervious to shock, and I dropped it several times from 8 feet to test that theory. No issues.

Further reading: Best external drives

Whether it would survive being run over by a car, I’m not certain and I don’t generally test products in that fashion. However, given the shape it’s not out of the question.

While the Survivor Stealth is a 10Gbps, USB 3.0, Type-A connector thumb drive, its internals are NVMe. Because of that, its performance is more akin to that of the external SSDs we review, than that of your garden-variety USB thumb drive.

Unless you’re really pinching pennies go with the 128GB or larger Survivor Stealth for best value.

Not a real complaint, but I’d like to see a Survivor that floats and is rendered in bright colors. Drop this in water and it sinks (which could be good or bad), and black can be a very hard color to spot in many environments. Maybe the Aqua-Survivor?

How much is the Corsair Survivor Stealth?

The Survivor Stealth is available in $20/32GB, $25/64GB, $30/128GB, $55/256GB, $100/512GB flavors as well as the $155/1TB version I tested. That’s approximately 62.5 cents, 39 cents, 23 cents, 21.5 cents, 19.5, and 15.5 cents per gigabyte, respectively. Yup, the value starts with the 128GB model.

Unless you’re really pinching pennies go with the 128GB or larger Survivor Stealth.

How fast is the Corsair Survivor Stealth?

In synthetic benchmarks and with small amounts of data, the 1TB Survivor Stealth performed well for a 10Gbps thumb drive SSD. That said, it couldn’t match the SK Hynix Tube T31, which is still by far the fastest USB thumb drive we’ve tested.

Note that the PNY Pro Elite V2 in the charts was a 256GB model, which partially explains its slower performance. It’s also excluded from the 450GB write chart for that reason.

The Teamgroup C212 is a 5Gbps product, with expectedly slower results. It is, however, a faster-than-average thumb drive and a good comparison of basic 5Gbps versus 10Gbps performance — hence its inclusion.

The Survivor Stealth was much closer to the top-rated Tube T31’s performance in CrystalDiskMark 8’s random write tests.

However, our 1TB Survivor Stealth did slow down rather rapidly during our real-world 48GB transfers, indicating a small amount of NAND allotted as secondary cache.

The good news is that it’s still writing at around 275MBps off cache, which isn’t the worst we’ve seen from an SSD by a long shot.

The 450GB write slowed down early and drastically, to the same 275MBps — taking over 30 minutes. That’s hardly as tragic as the 5Gbps Teamgroup C212’s 125MBps took over 50 minutes. Again, the Tube T31 remains unchallenged in terms of USB stick performance among the drives we’ve tested.

Overall, the Survivor Stealth’s performance is more than adequate for most tasks, and far better than the average thumb drive. That said, its main appeal is its ruggedness and weatherproofing.

Should you buy the Corsair Survivor Stealth?

If you have the need for a super-rugged USB stick that’s significantly faster than the 400MBps/5Gbps commodity types you find in abundance, then the Survivor Stealth is pretty much the best thing going. And as I said, despite the lack of IP certification, it should hold up very well to abuse and the elements.

On the other hand, if you’re interested purely in performance, consider the SK Hynix Tube T31, which also costs significantly less at around $90 for 1TB.