Fast, tough pocket storage

I've owned a couple of dozen flash drives starting back when they were a dollar a megabyte. Several of them have broken - usually when most needed.

But I've found a flash drive that not only handles the rigors of my car-keys-and-change pocket, but has also survived the washing machine. And looks good enough for a business meeting - not scratched and chipped like painted or hard plastic thumb drives - after 6 months of use.

And it is fast - something I hadn't appreciated until I tested it. That is important with a 16 GB thumb drive. Just last Friday I loaded it up with 12 GB of HDV video files to drop off to my editor and it only took about 15 minutes.

A product Storage Bits likes? Whoa! So what is this wonderful gizmo? The 16 GB Corsair Voyager GT USB flash drive.

A friendly PR person sent me one about 6 months ago in hopes I would review it about 5 months ago. But Corsair makes a lot of claims about the CVGT's durability and speed. Speed is easy to test but durability is another matter.

The CVGT - there is a non-GT model that comes in a variety of capacities - has what the Corsair web site calls ". . . performance IC-paired memory and controllers." That may be something more than marketing hype but darned if I know what it means.

Proof/pudding I ran a simple, non-exhaustive test on the CVGT and a 1 GB No-Name Drive (NND). A 581.5 MB QuickTime movie is written to each flash drive successively.

The empty NND took 190.5 seconds. An 80% full CVGT took 40.1 seconds. That is almost 5x faster. The Corsair web site only claims up to 4X faster performance.

I'm shocked.

The Storage Bits take The Corsair Voyager GT drive isn't perfect: the rubber coating makes it a little fat so you may lose use of a USB slot when the drive is inserted. And it would be nice to see a 32 GB version.

But I've seen them on the inter web for about $60, which isn't that much more than flimsier and slower drives of similar capacity.

If you need a fast, reliable and capacious thumb drive, you should consider the CVGT.

Comments welcome, of course.