Corsair Flash Voyager

Nothing New Under the Sun?

By Josh Walrath

            Flash sticks are flash sticks, right?  I had originally thought that myself.  How could one really improve upon the basic idea?  It seems as though the only real improvement to these products would be larger memory sizes.  This may very well have been the case… until Corsair wrapped their mitts around the product.

Catchy packaging that shows exactly what you get.  Note the 10 year warranty!

            Corsair has been a company that is not afraid to experiment, or think outside of the box.  Some of their ideas have been a great success (LED lighting on DIMMS, cooling products), while some have been failures (who remembers the Corsair barebones?).  The underlying truth here is that Corsair has a group of employees and engineers who are tasked with finding unique ways to present products.  Be this LED’s and scrolling lights and letters, or water cooled systems that bolt onto the back of any case, Corsair always tries to improve upon any product they release. 

First Impressions

            Corsair has a clean packaging for its product, and the transparent plastic allows the prospective buyer to take a good look at what they are buying.  The stick itself is of average size (there are larger and smaller products out there), but what really sets it apart is its rubberized case.  Most flash sticks just feature a hard plastic case and this can lead to these products snapping into pieces with long drops/stepping on/crushed/etc.  The rugged case of the Flash Voyager is pretty much immune to many of the hazards that users expose their flash sticks to.  The case also makes the product fairly water resistant.  While I would not recommend dunking the Flash Voyager into a bucket of water, it will most likely survive if it is quickly immersed in water, or has been exposed to any liquid for a short period of time (eg. someone pours beer all over the Flash Voyager).

            The Voyager also comes with a USB extension cable, as well as a lanyard for hooking the product around your neck.  The lanyard is very handy for those who frequently use their flash stick, as well as for serial killers wishing for an easy way to strangle you (the lanyard is pretty robust).

A solid accessory package was included with the Flash Voyager.  The lanyard is actually quite strong...

            No drivers are needed for Win2K and WinXP machines, but I have not had a chance to test this product on a Win98 or earlier OS.  Corsair does include a small CD which includes the user manual and drivers for older operating systems that do not support removable flash media.

            Finally Corsair has apparently worked very hard on the design to insure that it is very fast.  It is a true USB 2.0 device, and the flash memory used in it is a step up in speed from other USB 2.0 flash sticks.  My first impressions of this product were that it was amazingly fast.  This is in fact much faster than any previous flash product that I have ever used.  This particular model comes with 512 MB of memory, but Corsair recently released a 2 GB version.

Next: Testing

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