The Lowdown
It’s well built, reliable, fast, and reasonably priced. You’ll need to remember to put the cap somewhere safe when you are using the drive (annoyingly, the keyring/lanyard attachment is on the USB part), and some may not like the size of it – but apart from that, there’s little to fault here.
Video Review
In Use
The Corsair Flash Survivor Stealth was first shown to me by someone at a DJ show a year or two back who told me that “all the big boys are using this one…” . I’m not sure how true that was (or is), but as the drive I was using at the time was getting old and wasn’t very big, I got hold of one. So consider this a review/”one year on” road test.
First thing you notice is the excellent aluminium build quality. It has two rubber rings around it so it sits nicely on a desk, for instance. although it’s round so it still rolls! It also has a hole to hook it onto your keys or a lanyard. To get to the USB drive, you unscrew the two halves. There’s a rubber ring to ensure that when screwed together, the internals are watertight (they are – my assistant editor Joey dropped his in a pint of beer and it worked fine afterwards).
The drive itself is USB 3.0. Now while this won’t give you any advantage over USB 2.0 drives when you’re out and about (to the best of our knowledge all Pioneer gear is USB 2.0), where it will help you is if you have a USB 3.0 compatible laptop, because it will make the process of exporting music from Rekordbox on your laptop to the USB drive a considerably shorter experience.
Once you’re at your gig, you’ll encounter what we think is the only potential downside to this drive: It is quite long, so if you’re DJing somewhere where it is likely to get knocked, or you fear someone may lean over the DJ booth and yank it out, you may want something smaller! In all seriousness, some DJs really do prefer tiny USB drives, so if that’s you, you may want to think twice about this design.
Conclusion
It’s well built, reliable, fast, and reasonably priced (at least, up to the 64GB model, above which the price jumps quite fast, up to an expensive 256GB edition).
You’ll need to remember to put the cap somewhere safe when you are using the drive (annoyingly, the keyring/lanyard attachment is on the USB itself, not the cap), and as stated above, some may not like the size of it, but apart from that, there’s little to fault here.
