Forget the pokey transfer speeds and rinky-dink storage capacities of yesteryear’s flash drives. Corsairs mashing up SSDs with USB at Computex, with the announcement of the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB Flash Drive—a flash drive that is, for all intents and purposes, a modern SSD in an ultra-portable flash drive package.
Corsair says the Flash Voyager GTX offers 450MB/sec read and 350MB/sec write times on paper, putting it nearly on with the SSDs found in proper computers if reality matches those on-paper specs. The tech inside the drive mirrors SSDs as well, with support for TRIM, which improves performance over time by telling the drive when blocks of data can be erased or consolidated, along with USB Attached SCSI and SMART monitoring technology to keep an eye on the storage’s health.
The resemblance carries over to the sheer size of the flash drive: 128GB and 256GB versions are planned for $120 and $200, respectively. (Yeah, that’s an SSD-style price, too.) With a flash drive that large and that speedy, this thing seems ideal for carrying full operating systems and gigabyte-gobbling PC games around in your pocket, or simply boosting the storage capabilities of your current PC without having to plop a bulky external drive on your desk.
As you’d expect, Corsair’s Flash Voyager GTX supports USB 3.0 and 2.0, and plays fine with Windows, Linux, and OS X alike. It’ll hit the streets in July with a five-year warranty.