Last week Datawrite announced their next-generation VoyagerDrive USB 2.0 flash drive. (click the image above for the full release).
Well! "Flash" Drive! I had to get my hands on these namesakes to see if they lived up to my reputation. I have a couple of these to put through their paces. The Datawrite as illustrated is moulded in a semi transparent blue plastic case with brushed aluminium trimmings on the front & back. It came in a sealed moulded bubble transparent plastic case, which is normal for small electronic accessories, I find these very awkward to get into with my arthritis and had to cut the edges of the case with scissors leaving me with excessive recyclable waste. My next gripe is that the wrist band came separate to the drive and had to be threaded through a small loop at one edge of the drive, I found this worse than threading a needle. The Go England 2gig VoyagerDrive is smaller than the standard DataWrite VoyagerDrive, the case is a transparent England Red with the same style brushed aluminium front & back, it comes in the same type of packaging and there is a soft plastic fob with the England Logo on one side with a mobile phone cleaner on the other. I had the same difficulty threading this into the attachment eye of the drive. The nylon cord is attached to the fob with a plastic spring which I found stretched excessively when I tried to extract the drive from the USB connector.
The Go-England 2gig VoyagerDrive has a "Write Protect" slider on one side but there is no mention of this in the documentation and there is no indication on the switch as to determine the correct orientation. I found that by sliding the switch towards the USB connector write protection was enabled. The DataWrite VoyagerDrive illustrated above has no such switch


Well that's my gripes about the cosmetic side of the drives, now let's see how they perform.

The VoyagerDrive comes preformatted with the FAT file system and the available space after formatting is as expected a little short of the capacity of the drive (the extra being taken up with the file system overheads). The drives were instantly recognised with the Window XP OS and the generic windows drivers were installed. I checked with device manager to make sure they had installed themselves on the USB2 High Speed Hub

I found that if I left the drive in the PC when I booted up it would revert to the USB1 Hub an the performance was degraded considerably.

I just removed the drive for a few seconds and on reinsertion it would connect to USB2
As you can see the drive is automatically identified in Windows XP as "CBM2080 Flash Disc USB Device" which has the Chipsbank chipset. Windows 98 need to have the drivers installed before connecting the drive, these drivers can be downloaded from HERE

To check the performance of the VoyagerDrive I transferred files of the full capacity of the drives to & from a fast hard drive. Transferring 1gig to the VoyagerDrive took under 5 minutes and 1gig from the VoyagerDrive took just over a minute. I reformatted the 1gig VoyagerDrive to FAT32 file system and tested again to find an increase in time to transfer to the drive of 1 minute but file transfer from the drive was the same.
The 2gig drive took 5 mins 40 secs to fill & only 2 minutes to transfer to my hard drive.

		Hard Drive to VoyagerDrive	VoyagerDrive to Hard drive
1gig Voyager	Fat file system	4mins 50secs	65 seconds
1gig Voyager	Fat32 file system	5mins 40secs	65 seconds
2gig Voyager	Fat file system	7mins 53secs	2 minutes

I used two programs called HD Tune and ATTO Disk Benchmark to check the transfer rate of the VoyagerDrives and compared the results with SD Memory cards in a fast Card Reader. The current consumption was measured with a digital ammeter connected in line with the VCC + supply line of the USB connector

Drive	Size	Idle Current	Write Current	Read Current	Write Speed	Read Speed
Go-England	2gig	50mA	99mA	75mA	5.44 MB/sec	16.11 MB/sec
VoyagerDrive	1gig	50mA	98mA	75mA	5.85 MB/sec	16.59 MB/sec
Turbo SD	1gig	102mA	158mA	150mA	9.13 MB/sec	9.64 MB/sec
Kingston SD	512meg	100mA	136mA	126mA	2.55 MB/sec	7.33 MB/sec
Turbo SD Flash	1gig	105mA	133mA	128mA	4.16 MB/sec	3.74 MB/sec
Kingston SD Flash	512meg	91mA	118mA	107mA	2.26 MB/sec	4.23 MB/sec

If you click on the image of the relevant thumbnail graph below the full size graph will come up in a popup window.