Hands-on with the 64GB Corsair Voyager flash drive
It's time to throw away that cheap plastic 1GB flash drive, and get a 64GB model encased in rubber. Yeah, it'll cost you, but just think of the possibilities!
We won't beat around the proverbial: our 1GB and 2GB flash drives are chock-full of photos of ourselves greased and naked, posing in the shape of Tetris blocks. There's literally no room for spreadsheets. So we snagged a 64GB Voyager drive from Corsair and said to ourselves, "Selves, you know what this is good for? Backup."
Yes, rich people's backup. It costs about £150, so in terms of cost per gigabyte it's a huge expense compared to a small portable hard disk. But this thing is also tiny in comparison to those drives, it's encased in rubber, it's water resistant and has survived our attempts to break it by means of stamping on it and hurling it against a 1930s Kentish brick wall.
In our tests it wasn't quite as quick as the 16GB Corsair Voyager GT we tested back in May, though, but still speedy. We got sustained read speeds of 27MBps and write speeds of 8MBps, compared to the GT's 31MBps and 14MBps.
But still, the sheer attractiveness of being able to not only encrypt, backup and carry around any number of precious documents, but an entire MP3 music library and all your digital photos too is very attractive to us.
Even if your house burns down, your wife leaves you and takes the laptop, your remote backup company goes bust in the recession and your backup at the office is rendered useless when you're laid off, at least you can plan your suicide knowing that although you'll be useless when hurled off a building, the precious 64GB of personal data stashed in your jeans pocket won't be.
It's on sale now and comes with a marvellous 10-year guarantee.