Corsair - Flash Voyager 64GB review

It's fair to say that in the tribe of flash drives rampaging around the shelves of e-tailers and retailers, there are few beasts that can go toe-to-toe with Corsair's latest Flash Voyager. For not only is its footprint comparably significant, there's also the small matter of its 64GB storage capacity. It's a staggering amount, which would be ample to back up certain entire hard drives. It's just ripe, surely, for a Government department to pack with lots of confidential information and subsequently lose.

That said, losing it would prove to be quite a challenge. The Flash Voyager 64GB is a chunky device that protrudes a fair bit further than your average flash drive (unsurprisingly, given what it manages to pack into its chassis). It's just a little shy of the length of a credit card and its depth means that if you have two USB ports sat on top of each other, there's going to be some major fiddling to attach another device once the Corsair has put its towel over the proverbial deckchair (Corsair, to be fair, does provide a USB extender cable in the box for this reason).

As usual with Corsair's flash range, the drive is quickly and instantly recognised by Windows - and we tried this with both XP and Vista - and the firm hasn't bundled any software on it either. We quickly put it to the test and tried to get it to copy over the best part of 40GB of documents. It took a while, inevitably, to transfer the data, and the process eventually errored. The reason quickly became clear; one 6GB e-mail archive wasn't for budging, and that meant that the Flash Voyager was FAT32 formatted as standard. A quick reformat to NTFS overcame the problem.

So off to HD Tach, then, where one of the slight drawbacks to the product became evident. For the Flash Voyager 64GB simply isn't the fastest drive on the block: in fact it's some distance from such an accolade. Sequential read speeds are fairly constant, at around 22MB/s, but the burst speed of 25.7MB/s was a fair distance below the 4MB Flash Voyager Mini from Corsair that we recently tested. That clocked 34.9MB/s and even our aged OCZ Rally 2 2GB stick managed 25.1MB/s.

But then top performance clearly isn't the selling point here, as it's quantity and reliability that Corsair is selling. Once again backed up with a ten year warranty, the Flash Voyager 64GB certainly delivers in these areas and the robust outer rubberised casing is a fair shield of protection against accidental damage.

The price, inevitably, will leave a dent and serve as an active deterrant for most. The cheapest we found it was £149.99, which equates to £2.34 per GB. That's actually not bad, but considering you can buy a 320GB Western Digital MyBook external drive for £59, you have to wonder if flash memory, at this quantity of storage, is the right way to go.

Still, there are few quibbles about the quality of the 64GB Voyager and Corsair's standards are as high as ever. But this is undoubtedly a luxurious amount of flash storage for the near future and as a result it isn't likely to find its way into too many people's pockets just yet.
£150 inc. VAT