David.R.Gilson

Well, I thought it was about time I wrote something new. Seeing as I just got my hands on a new gadget, what better time?!

I have finally got my hands on (by virtue of recently having my birthday!) something I’ve been tempted to get for a long time – this being Corsair’s 64GB Flash Voyager USB thumb drive. So far, this is the largest capacity thumb drive you can get. For me it is ideal, because as I’ve spoke of before on here, I really seek to minimise my data footprint. So while those of you out there may need Terrabytes of storage, for reasons I can only imagine; perhaps you’re archiving the entire internet; I do not need that much storage space. I often trim my files, only keeping things that are worth keeping. As to content, I’m speaking about everything: documents, photos, music, etc. My footprint constantly floats between 42 & 44 gigabytes. So a 64GB drive with no need of cables or moving parts is my perfect back up device.

Unboxing …

So, let’s have a look at the thing…

Here’s the packaging, it’s presented fairly simply. There is a box-out on the back containing all the extra paraphernalia. The box is at the top-rear while the you can see the drive is lower-centre on the front. So the packaging could have probably been made smaller. It’s the standard hard plastic pack that you have to completely wreck to extract the contents.

Speaking of paraphernalia, here is everything included in the pack:

If you click on the photo to view it on Flickr, I’ve annotated everything, but here is a short list of the contents:

• 64GB Corsair Flash Voyager
• Short USB 2.0 cable
• Lanyard
• Attachable chain with a rubber fob to slot the drive’s lid onto while in use.
• Draw-string pouch to contain everything in.

The drive is encased in rubber which gives it a definite robust feel. The drive itself is also very large for a thumb drive, here’s a picture of it in my hand so you can see:

Because of the size, the USB cable that is supplied is welcome, as it might be too much weight if, say, your laptop’s USB ports aren’t very sturdy. To see what I mean, see how far it sticks out the side of my laptop (particularly note how it dwarfs the dongle of my VX Revolution mouse):

The drive also has a blue indicator light which blinks to show when it is reading or writing (click photo to see annotations):

Usage

In everyday use, I am practising what I preach and using Truecyrpt to make sure that the contents are safe from prying eyes. However, this does slow the drive down. In my owns tests, I found that the write speed directly to the drive was almost 10MiB/sec. However, the write speed to the Truecrypt container volume drops down to 4.7MiB/sec.

To back up all of my files, I’ve cranked up the geek-o-meter somewhat by writing a batch file that uses a little known Windows command line tool called “Robocopy“.

Related Links:

• Corsair Flash Voyager 64GB Tested