Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0

Sometimes you want storage that can hold plenty of files, and maybe survive an accidental trip through the laundry. The Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0 ($40 street) is just such a drive, with rugged rubber construction, 32GB of storage space, and USB 3.0, which easily offers better performance than USB 2.0 drives. If you need something even faster, there are drives with faster performance, but higher price tags. The Corsair Flash Voyager is an affordable compromise.

Design

The Flash Voyager USB 3.0's housing is made of rubber, which makes for a surface that's easy to grip and provides a level of rugged protection against drops and bumps. The lid/cap of the drive is also rubber, and fits snuggly over the end of the USB plug, providing a moisture-resistant seal. While we wouldn't recommend dropping the Flash Voyager into a puddle or a swimming pool, the moisture resistance is such that you won't need to be so paranoid when caught in the rain or drop your USB drive into a snow bank.

The whole rubber-covered enclosure measures 0.57 by 1.0 by 4.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 0.8-ounce. That's large enough that you might not want it on your keyring, and your USB ports will likely be blocked off (or at least crowded) by this chunky drive. There's also no way to tether the cap to the body of the drive, or to even to stow the cap when the drive is in use?this cap is going to get lost. It's not a matter of if, but of when.

With 32GB of storage space, the Flash Voyager USB 3.0 comes out to $1.25 per GB. That's significantly cheaper than the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Generation 2 (32GB) ($80 street, 4 stars), which has similar capacity and USB 3.0, but rings up at $2.34 per GB.

Features and Performance
I had high hopes for the Flash Voyager USB 3.0, based largely upon my expectations of performance from USB 3.0. We first tested the drive using the PCMark 7 secondary storage suite, the same test we use to measure the performance of portable hard drives. The Flash Voyager scored 335 points when connected via USB 3.0, only two points ahead of its 333-point score while using USB 2.0. To get a better idea of what we were expecting in performance, the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate Generation 2 scored 2,131 (USB 3.0) and dropped to 1,649 when using USB 2.0. The Corsair Flash Voyager GT (a different iteration of the same product) scored 799 points using USB 3.0.

In timed file transfer tests, the Corsair Flash Voyager produced speeds of 63.3 MBps (read) and 34.5 MBps (write). By comparison, the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 had a read speed of 61.8 MBps and write speeds of 99.4 MBps, while the USB 2.0 equipped Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight ($40 street, 4 stars) had much slower speeds (5.8s MBps read, 24.5 MBps write).

The end result is a drive which is faster than any USB 2.0 drive on the market, but that will get left in the dust by other USB 3.0 drives. In the end, whether or not you want to buy the Flash Voyager USB 3.0 comes down to what sort of transfer speeds you need. The Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate USB 3.0 is more expensive per GB, but offers significantly better transfer speeds, which is preferable if you work with large files, such as media or software. If not, the Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0 is probably the more sensible buy, based on price.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0 with several other flash drives side by side.

More flash drive reviews:
??? Corsair Flash Voyager USB 3.0
??? Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Generation 2 (32GB)
??? Kingston DataTraveler Locker+ (8GB)
??? Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight
??? SanDisk Ultra microSDXC Card 64GB
?? more

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