Full Review

As capacities shoot up, it is more important than ever for flash drives to up their speed. The Corsair Flash Voyager GT 16 GB is marked a premium product all the way from its looks to its speed. The red-and-black rubber covering of this Voyager GT does other stuff as well besides looking distinctly good – it is good for water evaporation in case it is drenched, and to break the fall if the drive falls down. In fact you might even feel tempted to aim and throw it down from a height, just to play with it, and then find that it still works just fine. It performs well in benchmarks, with a read speed average of 29.4 MBps, read access time average of 1 ms, and CPU utilization of 6 percent. Synthetic benchmarks were consistent with real-world speeds in read tests. But write speeds can be better judged through real-world tests. To see how it performs in real world usage, we transferred files to the flash drive. Writing large files (over 1 GB in size) to the flash drive results in a speed of 15.57 MBps. The speed of writing multiple small files (1.46 GB, 124 files of varying sizes) declines to 8.31 MBps (as expected). Real-world read speeds remained at the same speed as observed in the benchmarks, for both large and small files, when files were copied from the flash drive to a fast hard disk drive on our fast test bench. The Voyager GT is a fair bit faster than the cheap USB flash drives that currently flood the market. If you need to transfer large files on a regular basis, it is more than worth it since you can fill up 16 GB on the Voyager GT within 18 minutes (compared to over an hour for normal flash drives that aren’t featured in our Top 5 lists). It passed our test for USB-boot and ReadyBoost compatibility. This drive comes bundled with a USB extension cable and a neck strap. Corsair offers a warranty of ten years on this product.

Bottom Line

The rubberized body help protect from shocks and water. The lanyard and USB extender cable that come with the drive look good too.