Corsair Flash Voyager

Nothing New Under the Sun?

By Josh Walrath

Testing

            The easiest way to test this product is to actually see how fast it can read and write to a system. 

AMD Athlon 64 3700+

MSI K8N Neo Platinum

1 GB Corsair XMS 3200 XL Pro DDR

Maxtor 200 GB SATA 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Hard Drive (DiamondMax 10)

Windows XP Pro SP2

NVIDIA nForce Platform Drivers ver. 5.10 

            I took 324 MB of files and copied them to and from the Flash Voyager.  It is important to find the values for both read and write (as they involve very different processes).  Typically reading data is much faster than writing, and that is the case here. 

Read Speed

Write Speed

             These results are quite good, especially for the read performance.  Flash is not a very fast type of memory in these kinds of applications, and we can see that the performance does not come anywhere near the theoretical transfer rate of USB 2.0.  So there is obviously room for improvement, but for such a small product, at the price point it is at, it has more than enough performance for the average user.

The addition of a 3" CD with the manual and drivers is certainly a nice touch (especially for those Win95 and Win 98 users).

            As comparison, I have a generic USB 2.0 128 MB flash stick that typically has ½ the read/write performance of the Flash Voyager.  The engineering that went into the Voyager is pretty impressive, especially considering it is really a low end type of part (well, not counting the 2 GB version- which is definitely not low end). 

Conclusion

            Corsair has taken the basic idea of the flash stick and refined it to the outstanding product that the Flash Voyager is.  While I am not sure if there are any other possible improvements to the design (other than providing a true 480 Mbps read/write over the USB 2.0 connection), Corsair seems to have made a very solid product that can survive a great amount of abuse.  If you are looking for a really good flash memory product at a good price, the Corsair Flash Voyager certainly deserves your attention.

Even after just a few minutes in my pocket, enough lint has collected on the case to mar its simple beauty.

            The only real downside to this product is the rubber coating and its static properties.  If a user puts the Voyager into a pocket, it is going to attract a goodly amount of lint.  This isn’t a huge problem, as a good way to clean it is to quickly immerse it under a faucet.  I have been told that it can handle such a cleansing.  But, as with any computer product, do not unnecessarily expose the Flash Voyager to large amounts of water for extended periods of time.

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