In a galaxy full of turmoil and damsels in distress, Corsair has ventured into the unknown to seek and destroy evil and discover new planets. This is the spaceship Flash Voyager.

ACCESSORIES

Unlike many flash drives, the Flash Voyager includes a USB extension cable. Heck, a lot of thumb drives don't even work with an extension cable. Its short length of 21" is very disappointing, but it's probably as long as the USB platform will allow for devices that suck all of their power from the USB port itself. And let's also not forget that many USB ports are already connected to the motherboard via an extension cable.

Some may consider its lack of bundled apps to be a drawback, but we don't mind it so much. For one reason, most of the applications - such as Firefox and Thunderbird - that come with other drives are outdated by the time they arrive to the consumer. And besides, we can get all of the portable apps we need from www.PortableApps.com. So the bundled password protection software is really all we need.

Another neat accessory is the included lanyard. It works great for hanging the drive by the belt buckle, and it comes in mighty handy.

The Flash Voyager looks the part, resembling a spaceship with it's long, sleek, black, and turquoise design. It seems to have aerodynamic properties too, but spoil sports that we are, we opted not to test the flight pattern by tossing it off of a high story building.

Of course, the rubber casing does have its downsides. Rubber attracts lint very easily. And that keychain hole? Very flimsy. A good pull of he lanyard could break it. But that would take a really hard tug, and we'd be more concerned of the person's injuries than their flash drive.

We left our weight-o-meter in the other suit, but we can testify to the weight abuse this little drive can stand up to. This thing can live up to the most bruital circumstances. This drive just wouldn't die on us no matter how hard we shook it, squished it, or how many times we put it through the laundry (don't worry, flash media is fine with that, though we don't recommend it),

We were curious to see whether using the included extension cable affects the transfer rate, so we decided to include it in our benchmarks.  To test the speeds of the Flash Voyager, we used the following Athlon 64-based system, using nVidia's nForce4 SLI North Bridge. The speeds were recorded with our own flash media benchmarking software. We used the same 10MB and 100MB files of random data for each test respectively.

Oddly enough, the read and write speeds seem to be nearly the exact same. We also achieved nothing but a miniscule difference between using the onboard USB port without the extension cable and with it. Our conclusion? It doesn't matter whether you use the extension cable or not; you'll acheive the same transfer speeds regardless.

Our Recommendation

The Flash Voyager is one outstanding thumb drive. At $25, we can't think of any reason not to buy the drive as it provides the perfect blend of speed, capacity, and price.

It's always nice to have more than one opinion on a component before you spend your hard earned money. For one, we may see something others missed, or vice versa. As with all reviews posted at HardwareLogic, we'll not only give you our recommendation, but also point out some reviews from some other great sites around the web.

Overclocker Cafe
Bjorn3d.com
The Tech Zone
3D Velocity
Tech Power Up!