I also own the 8 and 32 and 64GB voyager, all are every bit as reliable as the 16GB drive.
Over the course of the last 8 years I've had a number of USB drives. Iomega, Corsair, Apacer, PNY, Sony and SanDisk. I've upgraded each time I felt the storage increase justified the cost. I work in information technology so they are tools more than toys, anyway on to the review. This 16GB drive is massive and well worth the money. I've used this flash drive in all sorts of systems and also have a .bat file that allows me to sync my data. I also keep an encrypted container on the drive, my point? Whether you are transferring data, encrypting data, saving data, or syncing data it works quite well. I also use some U3 applications like Firefox portable which allows you to run the browser from your flash drive and keep personal info off the local computer. Once again the drive works flawlessly.
I do agree that the protective rubber coating around the drive can make it somewhat difficult to plug in multiple USB devices, but Corsair does provide a USB cable extension which helps solves the problem. Another excellent feature is that this is one of the few USB drives that the cap stays on very tight. I've been asked by a couple of people what I use for encrypting my flash drive. The best software I've come across is called True Crypt (just Google it, it's an org site) it's a free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.
*******Important note on the 64GB Voyager*******
The 64 GB Voyager is 9 CM long without the cap and 2.7CM wide.
The 8, 16 and 32GB Voyagers are 6.5 CM without the cap and 2.3CM wide.
While it doesn't sound like a big difference it is when you're expecting them to be the same size.
I uploaded a picture in the product gallery so the size difference could be seen.
Update August 2009
An impressive 16GB flash drive and with zero issues since purchasing it. Corsair Flash Voyager 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive CMFUSB2.0-16GB
I purchased this drive from Amazon recently and tested it under both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows ME. In both cases, I saw excellent read speed but slow, slow write speed (1 MB/s to 1.4 MB/s, an order of magnitude lower than advertized). I was very disappointed at the poor performance to say the least.
Before returning the drive, I decided to test it under Windows XP. Wow, what a difference. The same drive, under Windows XP, is a speed demon. I am now satisfied that the drive behaves much more closely to it's advertized specs. For read speed, I am seeing something in the area of 30 MB/s, which is excellent. For write speed I am seeing roughly 7 MB/s. This is a little slower than advertized, but nonetheless, an excellent speed.
So, this is a great memory stick as long as you are using it under Windows XP (don't have Vista so can't comment, but I expect that performance under Vista would be similar). For earlier versions of Windows (9x and ME) though, be forewarned. Write performance is not good. Similarly, for Mac OS X Tiger be forewarned. BTW, for Mac OS X, I did try formatting the stick for HFS+ (the native Mac OS X format), but it made only a marginal difference.
I have this drive and last night I washed it in a pair of jeans, then unknowingly dried it. I figured it was toast for sure, but after plugging it in, it came up perfectly along with all my data. This thing can take a beating.
Apple Macbook Pro
The Macbook reports 14.99Gb of (actualy, useable) free space.
Copied 14.41Gb of data from the harddisk to the usb drive, while the Macbook was doing nothing else. The data was made up of mostly about video (about 30 files), with half a dozen small text files.
It took 33 minutes to write the data, which equals 0.44Gb/minute or 7.5Mb/second write speed.
It took about 10 minutes to copy the data back from the USB pen drive to the harddisk, which equals 1.44Gb/minute or 24Mb/second read speed.
The dimensions mentioned on Amazon are for the packaging not the actual pen drive.
The drive is the typical size for a usb pen drive. About 1.5 inches long, half and inch wide and quarter of an inch deep. Sizes are just guestimates, I did't use a ruler.
The rubber casing has a nice tactile feel to it. My only minor complaint, which almost every pen drive suffers from, is that although the (rubber) cap fits snug and securely onto the usb plug, I'm still not convinced it wouldn't wobble off when the drive is in my pocket. Ideally, I'd like the cap to screw on, but hey ho. It doesn't look like it is *likely* to come off.
I'm very happy so far, especially as I tested the write speed to be 18MB/S which is 50% faster than claimed. The read speed was the claimed 31MB/S.
Came with USB extension lead and disk with the encryption software on. My last flash stick was a Sandisk with 3U - it always gave quite a wait to boot up 3U so I don't think I'm going to miss it - perhaps will miss the auto backup software. The TrueCrypt encryption software that comes with the Voyager is freeware - seems very good and the latest version was on the mini-CD that came with it along with the Windows-98 driver.
My laptop has recessed USB slots and I could plug the device in no problem, but it does prevent use of the slot next to it unless the extension cable is used. I like the rubber case and I don't think this is going to be a big issue.
It seems the XP driver installs itself (no disk needed) and according to the device settings write caching is disabled which it says makes it safe to remove the device without first having to shut down the device - very nice.
Overall very happy.
The producto is awesome!!! All this space at a very reasonable size of flash drive. The rubber cover protects from almost any human accident.
The only problem (Corsair isn't accountable) is the limit of file size you can write into flash driver (2GB). However, this is a FAT32 filesystem limit, not a Flash drive itself limitation.
An option is to convert the filesystem to NTFS but, if you do that, you won't be able to use this flash drive with Mac or Linux. I think this will be a limitation of this kind of huge flash drives for a long time. - Thumb Drive - 16gb - Corsair - Flash Drive'
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