On Our Desk - 11

You Ess Bee

Ah, back to the USB drives now then. This time though we’re doing something a little different, though it wasn’t exactly our plan when we first started this article admittedly. It’s all shaped around the fact that one blando-generico USB flash drive somehow got mixed up in the testing batch. It'll keep VIA happy, nevertheless.

We’ve got three different USB drives here. A 16GB Razzo drive from Patriot Memory, a 4GB rubber-shelled Voyager Mini from Corsair and a 1GB keyring drive which is branded with a VIA label but is almost certainly not made by them.

The latter is just a bog-standard USB drive with absolutely no remarkable features but it does give us an idea though to see just how these ‘proper’ (read: expensive) USB drives might compare to something a little less beefy.

After all, it’s all very well for Corsair to label the Voyager as water resistant – but we’ve had many USB drives go through the washing machine with no trouble and we’ve even taken one surfing with us before. Just what is the benefit exactly, assuming we can ignore capacity that is?


Physcially, we’ve got all the bases covered here. The Corsair Voyager Mini is, just like the larger versions of this model, rubber-coated and while this one lacks a lid that doesn’t matter to much as the actual USB connection recesses into the body with the help of a little switch on the back.

The Patriot Razzo drive meanwhile has a plastic shell and basic transparent lid. It doesn’t feel especially sturdy or well protected, but it isn’t exactly vulnerable either. In fact, in a world of USB sticks we think Patriot could have done something, anything for a little differentiation.

The VIA drive however is of the swivel variety, with no real lid to speak of. Instead, the unprotected connecter rotates inside a little metal guard attached to a keyring. It comes with no guarantees about water-resistance, shock-proofing or the ability to survive the fallout of a bit-tech curry night. However, it was also free – though as we saw before with the Whack It! game, that isn’t always a good thing!

Performance-wise we ran the same tests over the cards as we did with the 32GB Corsair Voyager and Voyager GT – so you can compare them to those if you really must. We used the same file to transfer as before – you can see the results below.
The good news then for those of you who have previously splashed out and bought yourselves a proper USB pendrive instead of just re-purposing a randomly selected generic drive is that the generic drive was the slowest of all the drives we tested.

Of course, that said, the wait was still less than a minute for 100 or so megabytes – so unless you plan on moving gigabytes at a time there isn’t too much cause for concern.

When it came to testing survivability we ran all the drives through the same test – which is to say we tied them all up inside a sock and then ran them through a spin cycle.

The results? Well, while we’d love to make some big analogy or something about how one of them was rendered more useless than a flambéed muffin…but we can’t. Basically, every single drive came out fine and worked fine after a night left drying on the windowsill.

Next up in the testing process though was an impact test – which basically involves throwing all the USB drives off the top of our swanky spiral staircase. Again though, the only consequence here was that the rubber-coated Voyager series bounced away and we nearly lost one.


The funny thing is though that, since all the drives survived our survivability tests, all that really proved was that the we could replace the lost Voyager with any of the other drives. The second or two difference across the other models, excluding the VIA Generico, is pretty negligible.

Product Name: Patriot Signature Xporter Razzo USB
Manufacturer: Patriot Memory
UK Price (as reviewed): £57.59 (incl. Delivery)
US Price (as reviewed): $66.59 (incl. Delivery)
Verdict: A sturdy, if somewhat expensive flash drive - for £12 more you could have twice the space and more ruggedness with the Corsair.

Product Name: Corsair 4GB Flash Voyager Mini
Manufacturer: Corsair
UK Price (as reviewed): TBA
US Price (as reviewed): $31.39 (incl. Delivery)
Verdict: As rugged as the bigger versions, but pocket-sized. Perhaps Corsair should make a feminine coloured one and call it the Flash Voyager Cutie?