Corsair 8 GB USB 2.0 Ultra Rugged Flash Survivor Drive

This is the USB key Jack Bauer would use. The 8GB Flash Survivor GT, after all, is shock and water resistant - and if your service automatic runs out of ammo, you can even fling it's hard aluminum body at someone's head. But how does it perform?

Quite well, actually. Older keys can deliver great speeds with medium and large files but are painfully slow when transferring small ones. The Survivor GT, however, is speedy with all file sizes in both reading and writing tests. So if you need to copy that PowerPoint presentation off of Salazar's laptop before the building explodes, this is the thumb drive for you. The Survivor GT handily beats the original Flash Voyager GT in all our read and write tests.

We also tested the Survivor by dunking it in boiling water, freezing it, flinging it against a concrete wall, burning it with a butane torch, dropping it down four flights of stairs, and attaching it to a car muffler during a lunch outing, and it, well, survived...Read more

If you're like me, you've got important data that needs to survive the impending collapse of civilization and reversion to violent, nomadic, hunter-gatherer society. So get this, it's waterproof.

What's in an 8GB flash drive, you ask? Sure, you can pick up a cheap plastic trinket at Fry's for less than $50, so why consider anything else? A flash drive is a flash drive, is it not?

No, it is not. In chasing after that lower price point, 90% of USB flash drives on the market today have become cheap junk, made for pennies with bargain-basement components, and not designed to be rigorous. They're throwaway trinkets, and this becomes obvious in the transfer speeds, physical endurance, and data quality.

I regard data integrity of prime importance, whether it's a word-processing document or a file of viral sequence data, and I've had one-too-many flash drives go bad on me, resulting in hours of problem-solving from having my data corrupted. Now I can't help but regard those throwaway USB flash drives as anything but junk.

Worse than junk, actually ... especially in the case of silent corruption, caused by el cheapo flash components going...Read more