Corsair Flash Voyager (4GB)

9 out of 10 - Spectacular
Inexpensive, Fast, Exactly what I needed.
Excellent product. I needed to upgrade from a 2gb stick. I had a Verbatim Pro, which was solid. I didn'...
Excellent product. I needed to upgrade from a 2gb stick. I had a Verbatim Pro, which was solid. I didn't, however, want to spend a lot of money.

The Corsair Flash Voyager 4 gig stick is exactly what I needed. First it is surprisingly fast. I run a pretty standard PC with a 2.8 ghz pentium and USB drive. I can write about 2.5 gigs onto this stick in about 15 minutes. That is excellent for a 50 dollar stick. I have read nightmare stories of other brands, and particurly the cheap ones, that take hours to write the full stick volume. The data I transfer is just a single folder on my desktop that has my email archive, documents, PDFs, and so on, in hundreds of subfolders.

The cons are:

I'm not a fan of the rubber housing. It may be more durable than hard plastic, but I don't like the feel, the cap is tough to get off, because you have to shimmy it, and the loop that you use for a lanyard does not fill you with confidence. Note that I HAVE NOT attempted to stress the rubber loop to it's limit, bit it seems as if it would break rather easily if you snagged the stick on something. Because I carry this stick with me on my key chain, this is a concern.

The other issue is the software. The TrueCryp is not easy to use. For example, after you go through the multistep process of making a "volume" on your stick, you then need to "mount" it and "dismount" it every time you use it.

That is, you put the stick in USB, open TrueCryp, go into TC and browse for the volume on the stick, and "open" the volume by entering your password. You then need to browse to the pretend harddrive that the computer creates to match the volume.

With my last stick, all I had to do was put the stick in, double click an exe file on the stick, enter password, and go.

The two issues that I describe, to be sure, I only offer because it may be relevant to you.

This memory stick is a fantastic stick at a fantastic price, and it is now my brand of choice. Very fast for the $, and it's well worth the minor hassle of using the encryption software for me.

One last note! The write speed appears to be MUCH higher when using the TrueCryp. That is, the speed I cite above is with TrueCryp use. Without it, the same 2.5 gigs takes an hour to write to the stick. I don't know if this is a problem with my machine or if that's the way the device works, but that is my experience.

Great buy, and I'm very pleased. Read more
by PatentLawyerGuy (see profile) - February 10, 2007

5 out of 5 users found this user opinion helpful.