USB Drives have become something of a must have in the tech community, almost everyone I work with has one and I’ve noticed more and more recently that “ordinary” people are picking them up too. Whilst your average USB drive will have acceptable performance and function as advertised it’s always nice to have the best of the best. Corsair are renowned for their quality ram and when we heard they were releasing a USB flash drive we were keen to get a look at it and find out just what they could do with this technology. So today for review we have Corsair’s Flash Voyager USB drive…

Here’s the marketing blurb and features from Corsairs web site to let you know what the units all about:

"Corsair Flash Voyager USB drives are rugged, stylish, compact, reliable, and exceptionally fast, making them ideal for transporting MP3s, digital images, presentations and more. With data transfer rates up to 19Mb/sec, Flash Voyager drives are fully Hi-Speed USB 2.0 compliant, and are backward compatible with USB 1.1. They support Plug and Play with most operating systems. Their durable rubber casing is easy to grip and water resistant. These highly portable drives are available in capacities ranging up to 1GB."

FEATURES

* Plug & Play functionality in Windows® XP, 2000, ME, Linux 2.4 and later, Mac OS 9, X and later
* Drivers on CD for Windows® 98
* Lanyard, USB cable and driver CD included
* Supports sustained read speed of 19MB/sec
* Supports sustained write speed of 13MB/sec
* Ten year warranty

As you can see from the features list there is a decent amount of storage in this drive (our model is 512mb) and it’s running on USB 2.0 (with 1.1 compatibility). Of great interest to us was the “Water Resistant” claim, the unit is indeed cased in a rubber material which should protect it however you never know if it’s true usually until you drop your drive in a coffee, or sink etc and loose your valuable data.

With this in mind we headed off and grabbed a glass of water and proceeded to dunc our Flash voyager in there. Here is a video of the process and result. (Apologies for the darkness of the clip but you get the idea).

For those on Dial-up the result of dunking was a fully functional drive, even when still dripping wet.

***NOTE: Driverheaven does not recommend that you submerge your own flash voyager in water, we did so to save you having to***

The Unit
The first thing that strikes you about the flash voyager is its size, it really is tiny. There are a few images below which show the size of the unit compared to some everyday objects which will give you an idea of its size. On the weight side of things the Flash Voyager is feather light, around the weight of a AAA battery. Whilst we are on the topic of batteries, the drive doesn't require any and powers from the USB port.

For those of you who like lights, the Flash Voyager also has a blue light which flashes when the drive is accessing… here’s how it looks…

Setup:
Corsair claim plug n play compatibility is a feature of the Flash Voyager and this was indeed the case on our test systems. We tried the drive on a Compaq Evo N400 series laptop which is running Win XP and USB 1.1. The drive was immediately identified and working. We were also presented with the option to search for faster USB ports on the system to get optimal performance.

On a second laptop, a Sony Vaio with USB2.0 and WinXP the install was trouble free and finally on our main desktop review PC (WinXP and Asus A8N-SLI) the drive was again detected and available immediately. No problems at all. Other tested systems were WinME on a Compaq deskpro (USB 1.1), Windows 2000 on a Dell Optiplex (USB 1.1) and MAC OS X 10.4 preview on a iBook G4 (USB 2.0) all recognised the drive instantaneously and without issue.

Following detection the drive was already named “Corsair” so was easy to identify and the space available to us was 519,798,784 bytes.

So far its looking good then, pretty much everything you could want from a USB drive is here, of course this isn’t much good if the drive doesn’t perform well. So here’s some performance figures for the drive compared to the Ultra 4in1 usb drive that we recently reviewed.

	Time in seconds
Ultra 17.3mb to USB from HD	29.89
Ultra 17.3mb from USB to HD	1
Corsair 17.3mb to USB from HD	2.69
Corsair 17.3mb from USB to HD	0.5

	Time in seconds
Ultra 80.3mb to USB from HD	133.71
Ultra 80.3mb from USB to HD	3.3
Corsair 80.3mb to USB from HD	13.15
Corsair 80.3mb from USB to HD	3.0

The Ultra 4in1 is a USB 1.1 device, what the figures above show is that the USB2.0 capability of the Corsair model completely wipes the floor with the older technology. If you are transferring larger files between PCs or Locations you would save several minutes by using the Corsair Flash Voyager.

Out of curiosity we ran the corsair in USB 1.1 mode and compared it to the Ultra in 1.1mode.

	Time in seconds
Ultra 80.3mb to USB from HD	133.71
Corsair 80.3mb to USB from HD (usb 1.1)	99.36

As you can see from the above results, even when using the older USB1.1 speed the Corsair drive is 33% faster than the Ultra drive.

As a final test we transferred a Windows Media Video file to the Flash Voyager and attempted to play it back, the playback was flawless from the USB drive showing its entirely possible to run any presentations or video’s direct from the drive if you so desire.

Conclusion

If your going to do something you should do it right, and that’s what Corsair have done with their new Flash Voyager. There really is no fault to be found with this product. If I was to write a shortlist of what I would like in a USB drive it would be; Small, Lightweight, sturdy, stable and fast. The Corsair Flash Voyager is all of the above and even waterproof to boot! We experienced no concerns in our testing over various platforms and systems and performance was always first class. Even when running on the older USB 1.1 spec the drive outperformed a native USB1.1 device by a massive 33%. Add to this capacity’s of up to 1gb and there really isn’t much you couldn’t transport from location to location on your Flash Voyager.

As you would expect, a first class product from Corsair.

 

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