 Normally I'll get a request from a vendor to do a USB thumb drive review and I'm like... Naahhh... But every once in a while, the product notes will say something outlandish like SSD performance now in convenient travel size and I kind of go, okay send it over... So here we are, welcome to my video about the Flash Voyager GTX from Corsair. The Jazz Mini phone and tablet stand from Cooler Master is now available in a variety of cool colors from these great retailers. Click now to learn more. Now it's no secret that a USB thumb drive and an SSD are not fundamentally that different. There's an interface like SATA or USB, there's a controller chip and there's NAND Flash. So why does comparing the performance of an SSD to your typical USB drive feel about like pitting Batman against a one-legged dog in a cage match? What are the actual differences? Great question. First up is flash chip quality. Better NAND is faster and lasts for more write cycles but is also much more expensive. Second is parallelization. SSDs have more flash chips to read from and write to and accessing more chips at the same time within a drive is kind of like accessing more drives at a time in raid zero within a PC. And third is controller complexity. SSD controllers are much faster and use more advanced reading and writing algorithms to coax the best possible performance and longevity out of the attached flash. So that third point is what Corsair changed. They went and put an SSD controller in this thumb drives attractive metal housing with a little cap on it and stuff because while capacities for these drives have increased dramatically over the past few years, this one's 256 gigs, performance hasn't scaled in quite the same fashion. So that massive amount of storage that you can carry around in your back pocket becomes impractical for large files anyway because it takes so long to copy them back and forth. Okay then, so how does this one perform then Linus? Well, great question again. We did three different real world tests, a single 6 gig file transfer, a 1 gig single file transfer and a multi file transfer of over 2000 1 megabyte photos. And the answer is about as expected. For very small files, the better controller gives the Voyager GTX a real edge on more traditional drives in terms of write speeds, but makes less of a difference for reads. With our medium sized single file test, we noticed that it's got this weird fast bursting behavior that allowed it to read a 1 gig file faster than we could even start and stop the timer. And then write at pretty much the same speed as our SSD, leaving a more traditional, even performance oriented USB 3 drive behind and hanging right up there with an SSD. And finally, in our large file test, the Voyager GTX landed squarely between the other options for writes and much closer to the SSD for reads. Making the conclusion for this drive actually very straightforward. Is it as fast as an SSD? No, not exactly. But it's still super cool. And if you want to carry a bunch of data around with you in a form factor that's more convenient than an SSD on a dongle, but less convenient perhaps than a slim drive that doesn't interfere with the surrounding ports, then the Voyager GTX is your middle ground in terms of the actual size and shape as well as in terms of performance. Thanks for watching, guys. Like or dislike the video according to your feelings. As always, the link to the pricing for this product is in the video description, along with a link to our forum where you can discuss it away from the typical YouTube comment rigmarole. And also in the video description is a support link. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, become a contributor, or even just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. All that stuff helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.