On Our Desk - 10

Corsair Flash Voyager GT

Manufacturer: Corsair
UK Price (as reviewed): £31.70 (inc. Delivery)
US Price (as reviewed): $33.50 (excl. Tax)

Our final product in this round-up is the Corsair Voyager GT USB key, which wasn’t taken from anybody’s desk in particular, so to keep things even this can count as Brett and Phil’s contribution.

The Flash Voyager is a fairly standard USB key which comes in 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16GB forms, all of which have GT and non-GT variants except for the 16GB flavour. The GT status costs you a little extra, but delivers extra speeds and performance apparently.

Of course, without a non-GT version to test against, we’ll just have to take Corsair's word for that.

We got sent the 2GB version of the Voyager, which is makes it the lowest capacity drive in this round-up. However, it did come with some nice extras – like a lanyard to carry the drive on. The Voyager itself is rubber encased, which makes it water resistant (not waterproof) and impact resistant, both of which are good things. However, it also means that if you drop it then you can expect it to bounce all over the place before it comes to a rest.


The bounciness quite fun if you’re a bit bored and are sat at your desk, but not so much fun if you’re in a rush and drop it in the middle of a busy street. Or if your editor is watching you bounce a USB key about for an hour and calling it ‘testing’. Other than the above bounce tests, we made the Voyager run the now standard gamut of tests and it stood up just fine. 1.3GB across 16 HD trailers took 52.2 seconds to write and 48.9 seconds to read from, making it the fastest USB key we tested by two seconds. HDTach revealed the Voyager can reach speeds of up to 32.7 MB/s.

Moving on to the impact testing, we threw the Voyager around for a while and then took it outside and smashed it about in much the same way as the Survivor. The rubber casing took a fair few grazes and quickly dirtied up, plus the lanyard hook broke on the first hit, but the Voyager held up well even if we did almost lose it under a car as it bounced across the car park.


But, typically, we didn’t leave it at that and the USB came back home with me for a spin in the washing machine. I gave it a quick check over when it came out of the machine and noted that the rubber cap seemed to be trapping a few drops of water underneath, but I left them there so as not to disrupt the test and the USB could be fairly compared to the ATV Turbo.

A few hours later I took the Voyager off the tea towel and bought it back into work to give it a final run of tests. The files all proved to be intact still and the Voyager hadn’t suffered any visual damage – in fact it now smelled of Summer Citrus.

All in all the Flash Voyager seems the most well balanced of the USB keys I’ve used. It has a selection of different capacities and versions, as well as an affordable price point and a decently made protective rubber shell. It may not be suitable for the Ray Mears wannabes who want to use something like the Survivor, but it’s ideally placed to appeal to office workers and students who may accidentally damage their data.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

What do these scores mean?