MaximumPC 2007 01

Y

ou’re not supposed to speak ill of the
dead, so we’ll point out the one good
thing we can say about the floppy
drive: It was reliably generic—it didn’t matter
who made the thing. That’s not so with USB
thumb drives, which are constantly getting
faster, bigger, cheaper, and more distinct.
—Gordon Mah UnG

Corsair Flash
VoyaGer 8GB
Corsair’s Flash Voyager isn’t the largest thumb
drive around, but it sure is affordable, as well
as speedy. In our tests, the Voyager ran away
from all the others here in large-file transfers,
and only Kingston’s drive could match it in

medium-size JPG file copies.
Indeed, the Voyager only fell down hard in
one area: our small-file transfer test, in which
we copy several thousand archived Word
documents to the drive. The Voyager, which
spanks the others when swallowing a Norton
Ghost image or a half-gig game patch, slows
to a crawl copying 500MB worth of text files.
To be fair, almost every key we’ve tested
blows chunks in this respect. Corsair would
likely say that an 8GB key gets used for large-
file transfers, not Word files. Still, it’s something

to think about when you’re

waiting for that folder of

Office docs to copy over at 5

p.m. on Friday.

The Voyager supports

Corsair’s TrueCrypt security

using 256-bit encryption but, oddly, our drive

didn’t ship with the utility. Corsair said it was

an error and that shipping product would

include the app.

Despite the Voyager’s issues with small-

file transfers, we’re still fans. After all, you can

transfer an entire DVD to it in mere minutes

and still have room left over.

Patriot XPorter Xt 4GB

The Patriot Xporter XT offers the same capac-

ity at less than half the price of Kingston’s

drive (reviewed next). Unfortunately, that’s the

only stand-out feature we could find.

Like Corsair’s Flash Voyager, the Xporter

XT is dreadfully slow at writing small files, but

unlike the Voyager, it doesn’t make up for that

weakness with especially speedy large- and

medium-file transfers. The Xporter XT also

can’t compare to Kingston’s offering, which

too is just fair at large- and medium-size files,

but crazy-fast with small files.

Don’t get us wrong, the Xporter XT is no

slouch. It’s close in write performance to the

OCZ Rally and the SanDisk Cruzer that we

rated highly in November. But that was before

the 8GB Corsair and 4GB Kingston keys

arrived. And given the Xporter XT’s lack of U3

support or basic encryption utilities, we think

there are better choices out there.

KinGston datatraVeler

seCUre 4GB

Kingston’s DataTraveler Secure is billed

as an “enterprise-grade” flash drive.

Translated for civvies, that means 256-bit

AES hardware encryption, an IPX8 water-

proof rating, and a titanium shell. Oh yeah,

and optimization for small files. While

almost every key we’ve tested in the last

few months choked on the 10,000 Word

docs we feed them during testing, the

DataTraveler Secure was able to write that

onslaught of files in three minutes instead

of the usual 20 minutes.

That’s a huge difference, and for some-

one who needs to grab 500MB of small

Office files off the server at the end of the

day, it’s well worth the extra bucks Kingston

charges. And we do mean extra. Based on

street pricing and formatted capacity, the

Kingston key costs you around $61 per gig

compared to $21 for Corsair’s drive. Even

the SanDisk Cruzer that we looked at in

November is cheap by comparison.

Still, that’s the price you pay for small-

file performance. In other words, it’s a drive

that’s not only good at writing AVI files but

also DOC files. And for the office drone, that’s

probably money well spent.

Memory Key à Trois

This threesome of thumb drives is a mixed bag

you won’t be able to find a drive that offers more gigs per

buck than the rubber-coated Xporter Xt.

$170, http://www.corsairmemory.com

corsair flash voyager 8gb

thUMB

Fastest at writing

large files.

indeX Fin Ger

Chokes on kilobyte-size

files.

$244, http://www.kingston.com

kingston datatraveler 4gb

UsB

Fastest key for small-file

writes that we’ve ever

tested.

Ps/2

The chunky design and

Beverly Hills pricing makes

this a tough key to swallow.

$100, http://www.patriotmem.com

patriot xporter xt 4gb

Feet

Lowest cost per gigabyte

on the street.

Meters^7

Gets aced by the

competition in performance.

an 8GB thumb drive that costs what a 4GB

model did last year makes us happy.

the pricey datatraveler secure offers

great performance with all file sizes.

9

MAXIMUMPC

KICKASS

9

MAXIMUMPC

KICKASS

january 2007 MAXIMUMPC 73