USB Flash drives are officially ubiquitous in modern society. How do I know this? Because your mom has one. My friends tell me that their parents have them, too, and none of them are technically savvy in the least.
USB drives are extremely handy, and now you can pick one up for really cheap. Those of us on the bleeding edge have discovered that a 1GB, 2GB, or even huge 16GB flash drives just won’t do. We are busy people, and we need tons of photos, programs, emulators, websites, and data with us at all times, because you never know when you’ll need it.
Corsair has pushed the bleeding edge once again with their insanely huge 64GB Flash Voyager USB thumb drive. Not only does this unit have more capacity than a laptop computer from a few years back, but it is ultra portable and can fit in your pocket or a keychain.
The Corsair Flash Voyager family of USB drives are rugged, stylish, compact, and reliable, making them ideal for transporting MP3s, digital images, presentations and more. Flash Voyager drives are fully Plug and Play with most operating systems and are backward compatible with USB 1.1.
The Corsair Flash Voyager family is comprised of two outstanding products. The Flash Voyager GT is designed from the ground up for speed, optimizing transfer rates of both reads and writes, while Flash Voyager provides a durable USB drive in large capacities.
The Flash Voyager and Flash Voyager GT are enclosed in the Corsair proprietary all-rubber housing. Boasting water-resistant properties, these drives allow users to carry more valuable data and applications without compromise. Several reviews of the Flash Voyager products have demonstrated the ruggedness, durability, and reliability of the Flash Voyager family. The Flash Voyager has been shown laundered, baked, frozen, boiled, dropped, and even run over by a SUV in many third party reviews. After all the punishment it receives, the drive continues to work.
Features
- Plug & Play functionality in Windows® Vista, XP, 2000, ME, Linux 2.4 and later, Mac OS 9, X and later
- Limited 10-year warranty
The first thing you’ll notice about this Flash Behemoth is that it is extremely large; perhaps the largest USB drive ever at 4 inches long (with the cap on). It is 3.5 inches long without the cap, and only sticks out 3 inches when plugged in. Not only is the unit long, but has girth to match. At its widest point, the Voyager is 1 inch wide, which will certainly crowd any neighboring USB plugs.
The 64GB version of the Flash Voyager comes in a standard blister pack, proudly showing off the One Stick to Rule Them All. Hidden in a bubble compartment are several extra goodies, including a rubber cap holder (with clip-chain), a USB extension cable, and a small black bag.
The unit feels very solid. Squeezing the blue sides has a lot of push, and the unit doesn’t bend under hand pressure (although I wouldn’t intentionally try to break it in half).
The unit is completely encased in rubberized silicone, which makes it durable and extremely water resistant (although not waterPROOF). The Flash Voyager logo is imprinted with yellow ink on the top, and the Corsair URL on the back. The rubber cap has the Corsair “sail” logo on it. While most of the unit is black, the sides are flanked in blue. The rear of the unit has a loop for a lanyard or keychain, and a small window lets the blue activity LED shine through. The rubberized coating does attract pocket lint, but it won’t get beat up like other flash drives that have an aluminum or plastic shell.
We plugged in the unit to analyze its inner workings. The Voyager has 64,667,085,184 bytes available (or 60.2 GB depending on how you calculate what a Gigabyte is). The unit is formatted in FAT32 by default, which means that you’ll be limited to 4GB file sizes. So if you have a large DVD image then you’ll have to format this in Windows’ NTFS file system, which will make it incompatible with Mac OS and Windows 9x.
Flash drives work differently than other storage media. They perform better with larger file sizes, so to get a feel of its performance in different situations, you need to transfer many file sizes. We use the ATTO benchmark because it benches transfers of varying sizes. From our experience, real-world testing (copying a file to and from the device) mirrors what this benchmark finds.
Your actual performance will vary depending on your computer’s chipset, drivers, processor and several other factors. We compared the Flash Voyager with several other flash drives we’ve tested, to show how they perform against each other. We used OCZ’s ATV 4GB drive, OCZ’s Rally2 Turbo 4GB drive (one of the fastest USB drives we’ve tested), A-Data’s convenient C702 16GB drive, and we threw in an iPod Classic 80GB in to shake things up. The computer we tested on had the following specifications:
- Intel E6600 Core2 Duo Processor
- Foxconn 975X7AB motherboard (Intel 975 chipset)
- nVidia 7800GT PCIe video card
- 4GB A-data Vietesta DDR2-800
- 300GB Seagate SATA HDD
- Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
According to our tests, nearly all of the drives had about the same read performance, having the same performance arc and maxing out between 26MB and 28MB per second. The iPod had a top read speed of 15MB per second, which seemed odd for a HDD-based solution.
Things changed quickly when comparing the write performance of each drive. Each drive has a different sensitivity to smaller files, but all reach their peak at 64MB file transfers. The iPod and OCZ Rally2 had the fastest write speed of around 23MB per second. The A-Data C702 had a below-average peak of 8MB write speed. The Corsair Voyager and OCZ ATV had almost identical peak performance at 13MB/second peak write speed. The Corsair Voyager handles smaller files better than any other drive, as it nears its peak transfer rate with 16MB files (the others reach their peak with 64MB files).
There is no question that 64GB is the new bleeding edge standard for USB Flash Drives. The problem with having so much available space is how long it takes to fill it up, which can be quite considerable with a slow drive. Even in a best-case scenario, it will take 82 minutes (or 1.3 hours) to completely fill the drive. Still, most of us will value space over speed, as I have been rather happy with a 16GB drive, even though it was rather slow.
Right now, consumers have to choose between large capacities or fast write speeds in their USB sticks. There currently isn’t a drive that has both, but I’m sure as competition heats up that we’ll see fast USB drives that could be a serious alternative to a solid-state hard drive.
The 64GB Flash Voyager compares very well with OCZ’s ATV flash drive (except for the difference in capacity). Both are ruggedized, utilize the same cap-retention mechanism and have nearly identical transfer rates. A write transfer rate of 13MB per second is decent and is better than many other drives. Those looking at 64GB drives are typically computer enthusiasts and would prefer high transfer rates like the enthusiast-level (and comparitively expensive) Rally2 Turbo.
The 64GB Flash Voyager isn’t as expensive as you may think, either. Smaller drives may be less expensive, but they cost more per Gigabyte. The other drives used in this review can cost between $3.50 to $14.50 per GB!
Corsair’s 64GB Flash Voyager should be on your short list of large-capacity USB drives. It performs well and its extensive 10-year warrantly will certainly last until you upgrade to the 1TB Flash drive on the horizon.
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1 Comment
This drive quit on me after completely filling up the drive. Could not even format it. My theory is that there was a bad cell in there somewhere, and writing to it made the entire drive unusable.
It is under warranty, but buyer beware.