The Gadgets Page

I’ve finally found a flash drive that works for the power geek: The Corsair Memory Flash Voyager 16GB. It’s fast, low power, and extremely high capacity at 16GB—more than enough for even the very largest files you may need to transfer. It comes in a novel neoprene case with a cap that makes it waterproof when closed.

With a sustained 7MB/sec write speed, the Flash Voyager is comparable to most medium speed flash devices. It’s not as fast as high-speed camera flash memory, but it’s faster than most thumb drives. Read speed is a nice 12MB/sec.

At 16GB, I can move an ISO of an installation DVD, an entire virtual machine, the largest Photoshop RAW images, entire websites, and do backups of all of my important files onto a single stick. It’s big enough to hold my entire MP3 library as well.

Another nice feature is the low power draw. I’m able to gang four of them on a small bus-powered USB hub off a single port of my MacBook Pro (which are notorious for supplying the low end of the power specification for USB) and drive them all as RAID-0 array with no external power adapters.

Next time you’re looking for a thumb drive, choose something that works well instead of the cheapest one you can find. With low power, intense speed and high capacity, you can’t go wrong with the Corsair Flash Voyager.