Product On Review: Flash Voyager GS 128GB
Manufacturer and Review Sponsor: Corsair
UK Street Price: £91.99 (inc. V.A.T.)


Corsair have built a sterling reputation for themselves over the years for excellent quality peripherals, cooling solutions and power supplies, but it all began for them with memory; RAM to be specific. We’re not quite back to the old days today as we’re talking non-volatile rather than volatile memory, but we are today's review would have been classed as Corsair’s ‘core business’, before they diversified to their current extent.

Competition is hotting up in the USB 3.0 Flash Drive arena, with manufacturers moving away from re-housed USB 2.0 or low-speed controllers capable of less than 100MB/s read rates. Corsair are keen to differentiate their latest products from their rivals, and are releasing a number of USB thumb drives to satisfy a wide range of users.



The Flash Voyager series is Corsair’s main line of flash thumb drives (often known as USB memory sticks), and there exists many subcategories with this line. The original Voyager designs were from the USB 2.0 era which have since been supplanted by USB 3.0 variants - the retracting-design Voyager LS and high performance Voyager GT. Now catering to high end users with a need for higher capacities and desire for something a little more stylish is the Flash Voyager GS.



The Flash Voyager GS comes in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB flavours and is capable of file transfer rates well within the USB 3.0 envelope. In common with most USB 3.0 flash drives performance - especially write performance - is dependant on capacity; the larger the drive the higher the speed. Whichever capacity you choose however you should expect rates of around 200MB/s read and greater than 70MB/s write.

Construction is the other pillar of the Flash Voyager GS. Housed within a brushed aluminium chassis, the drive should prove to be durable for the shocks and bumps of modern life in addition to looking good and discrete if that’s important to you personally or professionally.

The 128GB variant we have today checks in at around £92 and is extremely aggressively priced when considering the market as a whole. From other vendors you can comfortably expect to shell out well over £100 for 128GB in the USB pen drive form factor (notably much more even than a SATAIII HDD), and even USB 2.0 speed drives of a similar size would exceed £55. If Corsair can live up to their performance claims the Voyager GS looks to be exceptionally keenly priced.