May 4
Reviews David
64gb, corsair, data, drive, flash, storage, thumb, thumb drive, usb, voyager
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:
Share this post 
Dec 1
How-To Guides David
back up, decryption, encryption, freedos, hard drive, maintenance, password, repair, rsync, spinrite, syncback, synchronise, Tech, thumb drive, truecrypt, usb
Part 2
Last time we ended with showing you how to encrypt your thumb drive. Now we’ll resume and show you how to make using encryption a little less inconvenient.
We can minimise the inconvenience of using TrueCrypt by going back to the “autorun.inf” file we created before. I didn’t write the autorun script that I use for TrueCrypt, I copied it from a post on “EricsProjects” blog (follow the link for the script). With that script, I get this window when I plug in and autoplay my USB drive:
Note: Follow his instructions about copying TrueCrypt to your drive or this won’t work. You need TrueCrypt installed on the thumb drive if you’re going to be able to decrypt it somewhere other than your home computer.
All you have to do is select the TrueCrypt option, then you are given a prompt for the password to decipher the encrypted volume. Once this is done, you can just run your normal back up routine. This is of course a subjective thing to say, but I think an extra double click and password entry per-plug-in is a small price to pay for knowing that if you loose your drive, nobody will be able to read your files.
Finally, I said in part 1 that my thumb drive could repair my hard drive didn’t I? Well yes, but there’s one catch though. Up until now, the software I have recommended has been free of cost. The hard drive repair program I am using is Steve Gibson’s “SpinRite” [Wikipedia] which costs $89 US. I’d heard so many testimonials on the “Secuirty Now” podcast, that I finally decided I must get it. Many of the testimonials were about people who didn’t want to buy SpinRite, but had finally bought it out of desperation when their hard drives seemed inoperable, making strange noises, etc. Those people then reported that their drives were brought back to life by using SpinRite (running it for days on end in extreme cases). If used routinely before problems occur, it can help the hard drive’s own systems help detect and avoid problem areas on the disk platters.
The way SpinRite works means it needs exclusive access to your drive, so you must install SpinRite to some removable media, then boot your computer from that media. This has the advantage that it is truly platform independent (it utilises the “FreeDOS” operating system). Here is a picture of it in action:
So, there we have it. A USB stick that keeps a back up of all your irreplaceable data. You have the assurance of knowing if a bad guy finds it, your privacy is safe and if a good guy finds it ,they can get in touch with you to arrange its return. Finally, if your hard drive seems to have died on you, not only do you have a safe copy of your files, but you can probably return the drive to service by booting from this same little USB stick and running SpinRite.
Please let me know if you have any improvements on what I’ve posted.
Share this post
Nov 24
How-To Guides David
back up, decryption, encryption, freedos, hard drive, maintenance, password, repair, rsync, spinrite, syncback, synchronise, Tech, thumb drive, truecrypt, usb
Introduction
This is a series showing you how you can load up a basic USB thumb drive with some practical tools which will ensure you can keep your data safe from theft and hard drive failure.
Part 1
This USB drive has become a powerful tool for me. It holds an encrypted back up all of my irreplaceable data and it can repair my hard drive in the event of failure.
For back up, I just do a simple “synchronisation” of files. I use a Windows program called “Syncback”, but you could just as easily use any other synchronisation/backup program, such as the open-source “rsync”. I simply plug in the USB drive, start up Syncback and run my backup profile. Files that have either been created or updated since the last backup are copied on to the drive and files that have been deleted are also deleted from the USB drive. You could argue this lacks sophistication, although I prefer the lack of complication. If I’m working on something I want chronological versions of, I’ll create chronological versions myself – it’s all in my control. (Although, I will admit that since I first wrote this, I started using an on-line back up service as an added layer of protection, and that does take chronological versions of files as I they are edited.)
Something to consider, this is only a 4GB drive, and all my irreplaceable data only takes up 2.7GB (so far). This doesn’t sound much, but I’m being very minimalist. You know when you’re moving house you start to wonder how you amassed so much stuff that you never use or think about? Be honest, you do don’t you? Well what you accrue on your hard drive is much the same. So if you want to be able to get all your stuff on such a drive then you need to have a ruthless clear out of your personal data. Note that I’m not including music here. If it comes to it, you can buy and/or download replacements of your music, you can’t do that for all those photos of your friends and family.
Now, if you get in to a routine of doing this simple back up, what if you lost the drive? You then have two problems: how could anyone return it to you and what about your privacy?
For identifying yourself as the owner, you can do the following. Create an “autorun.inf” file on the root directory of my drive (yes, this is a Windows thing, sorry). I then used the “label” command to show my e-mail address. To do this, you’d write a line in thie autofun.inf file (it’s a text file so only use notepad or similar): “label=email@somedomain.com”. In the “My Computer” window, your e-mail address will show in place of the drive letter. You can find even more tips about how your lost drive can identify it’s owner at this post on Daily Cup of Tech.
For your privacy you need to encrypt your data, and the ideal choice is the open source & cross platofm encryption application, “TrueCrypt”. The simplest way of working with TrueCrypt is to create an encrypted “container file”, which TrueCrypt then mounts as a drive on your computer. When it comes to security there’s one constant rule – the more secure it is, the less convenient it is. So if we were to take the step of backing up onto an encrypted virtual drive, we’ve given ourselves some inconvenience. Believe me, if you don’t mind even more inconvenience, TrueCrypt can give you some real James Bond level privacy protection, but we’ll leave that for another day.
See part 2.
Share this post
Sep 19
Personal admin
64gb, corsair, thumb drive, usb
I’ve been talking for what feels like a long time on the Crave Podcast Lounge, about minimising my data footprint; i.e. the total amount of data storage that I need. Recently, I did get myself down to less than 39GiB. Although, it was clear I’d never get to the point where the (until now) largest 32GB drives would be enough.
Well, forget all of that because I got a rather interesting e-mail from an e-retailer last night. Corsair have finally released a 64GB thumb drive, see here: Continue reading …
Share this post
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google
Flickr
YouTube
WishList
RSS
