Corsair Flash Voyager GT Flash Drive Review

Getting to the actual focus of the review, the 4GB flash drive is also a treat, sporting a casing made entirely of molded rubber that's quite flexible and resilient to shock damage - even the lanyard loop and indicator light are made of rubber. The indicator light, subtly branded with the capacity does not light constantly, but it will shine bright blue rapidly as the drive is accessed by the computer. Appearances are not easily maintained by the Flash Voyager GT. While it is colored a ferocious red (coinciding with the urban legend that red cars get more speeding tickets), the rubber exterior easily attracts dust, lint, and oils from being handled and stuffed in a pocket. At least it won't get scratches easily.

Extreme Speed
For a drive that's designed to outperform every other flash drive currently on the market in terms of raw speed, I find it curious that Corsair does not advertise speeds on their website, and only mentions "GT Series - Accelerated Read/Write Speed" on the packaging. Make no mistake though; the Flash Voyager GT is blazingly fast.

Using Corsair's specs of 34MBps / 28MBps (raw throughput) for the 4GB flash drive as a reference, my tested speeds never quite hit the posted ratings, although they're still plenty fast to satisfy the impatient gamer and geek that I am. As you can see in the Sandra synthetic benchmark results below, I was able to hit 32MBps / 22.4MBps read and write speeds during the 64MB file transfer test. Transferring smaller 32KB files, speed drops to a lower 10.6MBps / 4.2MBps, which still outperforms many of the other flash drives that we've reviewed in the past.

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark

Okay, enough with the synthetic benchmarks. The people who actually go out and buy this drive won't be spending their time throwing insignificant word documents on it or inflating their ego by running benchmarks all day (okay, maybe they will); they'll be too busy transferring large disk images, movies, setup files and zip archives to care. For real world testing, I copied a defragmented 640MB ISO file to and from the Flash Voyager GT using Microsoft Robocopy, producing read and write speeds of 29.3MBps and 21.5MBps respectively. That's pretty darned impressive!

Bundled Security
Perhaps my favorite thing about the Flash Voyager apart from its speeds is the inclusion of the TrueCrypt encryption software. This ingenious software can create an encrypted volume to be mounted to a drive letter either through a file or an entire device, and can create a hidden volume in a regular volume's empty space for plausible deniability (when at gunpoint, give a password that works for everything except your uber-secret files, and they have no way of proving you're lying). For multiple layers of security, it's also possible to use keyfiles (ordinary jpegs, mp3s, etc) in combination with a password. There are several encryption and hashing algorithms to choose from as well, including the industry standard AES algorithm.

It's by far one of the best encryption programs out there, although like many volume encryption programs TrueCrypt requires administrator access on the computer you're using, and unlike the software bundled with Lexar's Secure II drive it cannot encrypt individual files with standard user permissions. In other words, don't expect to use the encryption functionality at work or school, only on the computers you own. On top of that, Mac OS is not supported by TrueCrypt, only Windows and Linux. Still, TrueCrypt is free and open-source, and you can download and try it for yourself today.

Delightfully Durable
We all know the Flash Voyager is more durable than your average flash drive just by looking at it. It's also fun to fiddle with the rubber casing when bored in a waiting room. What's important to remember however is that Corsair has no posted numbers dealing with submersion depth tolerances, crush resistance, falling height, etc., and only claims the Flash Voyager line to be "water resistant", "anti-shock", and built with a "durable rubber construction" rather generically.

For an official stance, that's not quite enough to bring out the worst of my testing. Thankfully, the unofficial stance is much more optimistic with their marketing taking no hesitation mentioning on their website that the Flash Voyager has been "laundered, baked, frozen, boiled, dropped, and even run over by a SUV in many third party reviews". In an email dialogue with a Corsair PR representative, it was also mentioned that the Flash Voyager was used as a coffee stir and stomped on by a lot of excited LAN gamers. (Now that's brutal). Okay, Corsair, you forced me to do this.

Before I begin, let me just say that all of the aforementioned durability tests as well as my own are performed with the cap on. If you lose the cap since there's nothing connecting it to the drive, Corsair's support forums detail how to get a replacement sent to you presumably free of charge.

For my first test of durability, I'm going with Murphy's Law: laundry day. Left in a blue jeans pocket, the Flash Voyager GT had to endure a super load of laundry in cold water with the easy care / permanent press setting, and then spend 60 minutes in the drier with normal heat settings.

Incredibly, the drive still worked immediately after being taken out of the drier. Okay, so we know heat and sloshing water don't phase the drive, how about sudden impact? To test this I got on the roof of my garage and tossed the 4GB flash drive down to the driveway as hard as I could 5 times, although technically it fell 8 times because my friend somehow doesn't know how to throw like a man. While not as bouncy as a rubber ball, the Flash Voyager GT did get some decent airtime, actually bouncing over the hood of my Honda Element and into the lawn on one occasion.

While my friend may not know how to throw, he is a physics student and informed me that throwing the drive onto the concrete floor of the garage would prove far more devastating than a tall drop onto somewhat softer pavement. Judging by the smack! sound the drive made as he spontaneously chucked it down, I believe him. Surprisingly, the Flash Voyager survived both of these kinetic tests without a single scratch.

Ultimate Survival
For my final test, I decided to test its crush resistance by running it over with my Element and its 3500-pound curb weight. Like the three drives (Cruzer Titanium, Data Traveler) I've run over in the past, the Flash Voyager GT was wedged under the tire on its side instead lying flat to ensure total brutality. (Even cheap drives will survive being run over if they're lying flat). My apologies for the wind noise present in the video.

At first glance the Flash Voyager still looked to be in pristine shape, however after removing the cap I discovered that the USB connector was bent inwards. After using a dime to straighten out the connector so it would fit in my Macbook's USB port, I was saddened to see a "USB Device Not Recognized" balloon pop up on my desktop.

After the video was shot my tinkering friend removed the rubber coating and discovered that the problem lied with the internals of the USB connector itself, and with proper force applied continuously (using a USB extension cable to protect my laptop) the drive was visible and fully working within Windows, data intact. Assuming you had a spare USB connector and a decent soldering hand, you could rescue the data from the Flash Voyager GT quite easily should it ever be run over in real life. It's a shame that the drive broke down at this stage though... I was about to hurl it after subjecting it to the subzero temperatures of dry ice!

One last item I feel I should mention. There was a story that ran a couple of months ago on Hardware Secrets that we covered, where the original Flash Voyager snapped in two due to a gap between the printed circuit board and the USB connector. This actually happened to one of my friends over at LANmaniac as well, just from the drive being in his pocket. After comparing my corpse of a flash drive to the pictures available on Hardware Secrets, it seems that Corsair has indeed removed the troublesome gap, making it less likely that your flash drive will snap in two. This is very welcome news indeed.

Recap
After all was said, done and destroyed, I was quite impressed with Corsair's Flash Voyager GT. The file transfer speed is unmatched and the endurance factor of the drive is well beyond that of your typical flash drive, although it didn't totally survive the SUV crush test. With the bundled USB cable and thick lanyard, the Flash Voyager GT makes one heck of a package deal that's well worth the money and deserving of my high recommendation.