What would you do with a 32GB Flash Drive? Mine contains my entire music collection, all of my important documents, my family photos, a restore image of the operating system on my computer, and 6GB of free space. When you’re used to using 2, 4, or even 8GB flash drives, you find yourself looking for stuff to store on this drive…it’s actually tough to fill up! Voyager will hold almost 10,000 6 MegaPixel images, or nearly 13 hours of MPEG-2 video (152 hours of MPEG-4), or 8,000 of your favorite MP3 recordings. Imagine the possibilities – a thumb-sized device that has the capacity to store all of your important data securely in one location, and is accessible from nearly any computer. It even comes complete with an encryption application already aboard. The Corsair Voyager is compatible with Windows ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac (9.X and later), and Linux (Kernel 2.4.2 and higher). Pretty much everyone can utilize this device.

Don’t let Voyager’s rugged good looks and large capacity fool you. This drive is a performer, too. It’s fast. Really fast. Twice as fast as any flash drive I compared it to in both read and write speeds. For this review, I benchmarked against a 2GB Memorex flash drive using the ATTO Benchmarking tool. I would have liked to use a similar sized flash drive to compare with, but there are not many offerings available in this capacity range and the one I tried to get my hands on was out of stock at the time of this review. I’ve always been happy with my Memorex drive, it’s been fast and reliable…or at least I thought it was fast. As the images below demonstrate, Voyager’s read speeds (22.2 MB/sec) are almost twice as fast as the Memorex read speeds (12.2 MB/sec). Write speeds are similarly impressive with Voyager writing at 10 MB/sec. The Memorex drive was barely able to manage 3.3 MB/sec.

Corsair Voyager top, Memorex Traveldrive bottom.

And it’s rugged. With it’s rubberized case, dropping this drive isn’t a problem. I actually tried to destroy this flash drive as a part of the testing for this review. I ran both drives over with my truck (1/2 ton Dodge) and ran the bench test again. There was no difference in the results for either drive. I tried running them through the washer and dryer. I put the Corsair Voyager in one pants pocket and the Memorex Traveldrive in the other, ran them both through a hot wash/cold rinse cycle, and tossed them in the dryer set to the cotton (high) setting. The Voyager showed no change in the bench test following this procedure. Unfortunately, the Memorex drive did not survive this test and the data it contained was lost forever.

So I boiled Voyager. I boiled it at a rolling boil for ten minutes…long enough to hard boil an egg. I then blew off the contacts with compressed air, plugged it in, and it still worked! Not only did it still work, but the read/write speeds were unchanged. So I froze it. Left it in the freezer overnight, blew the contacts off, and ran the bench test again…no change. So I froze it and boiled it…just took it out of the freezer and dropped it in a pan of boiling water. No drive can survive that. The Corsair Voyager took it right in stride with no change in the benchmarks. You just can’t hurt this thing.

The Corsair Voyager comes with a 10 year warranty and I think it’s a safe bet that they’ll not have to warranty many of these. After the punishment I inflicted on this drive and to have it still work at all is impressive, but to come through all that without a difference in performance is absolutely amazing. If you’re looking for a secure storage solution that will stand up to everyday punishment, the Corsair Voyager is the device for you. With a price tag of $229.00 (US), this drive is a little spendy, but is not out of line with other drives in this capacity range…and it’s definitely worth the price. I tried to find something bad I could say about Voyager, but just couldn’t find anything I didn’t like. Once again, Corsair has a winner.

Definitely Geek Approved!

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