Have been looking for a fast, robust usb2 flash drive. Reviews seem to point to Corsair's Flash Voyager drives.
They're cool. They're fast. They bounce. They can handle getting caught in the washing machine, or being dropped in a mug of ale.
The pictures on the web site don't do them justice: they are small, thin, and the rubberized coating is besides functional, just neat, if not unique in the flash market. They're also thin, which makes carrying them in you jean's coin pocket doable. Various reviews have pointed to the bounceableness of the drives as well as their leak-proofness (they survived bear dunking and washing machine full cycles)
And yes, they are fast. The reviews (many now linked to Corsair's site) show that they do manage their claimed throughput speeds.
A couple of design points: (1)no physical lock to make the device read only, but since the point of these is mainly to enable fast shared writes, that's not a major issue. (2) there's nowhere to put the cap: it does not stick on the end of the drive so you need to (a) put the cap somewhere safe and (b) remember where you put it. Not optimal.
Finally, Corsair also offers downloadable security software for locking out a partiction on the drive from access. They do not have a mac version, but their tech support (Ram Guy) suggests that such a product may be in the works.
In the meantime, i'm using a password protected disk image, created with osx's disk utility. Another colleague, Mauricio Varea, suggests that you can also partition the drive on a windows box, and then on the mac, reformat one of those partitions as an HFS+ (mac) formatted drive. Cool.
In the UK, these are available at scan.co.uk and dabs.com
Posted by mc at February 25, 2005 02:34 PM