Voyager GT Synonymous to Unreliable...

[ggrimm]

OK From the start...

 

I hand picked the Corsair Voyager GT 8GB flash drive from the rest of the market back in July. (I never read the support forum threads...wish I had...)

 

Anyway...we bought like 6 through out DoD Contract down at Eglin AFB. They were nice, fast...of course they were basically pregnant flash drives compared to the other. But the performance made up for the large size.

 

So after owning a few flash drives that cost a quarter of what I paid for this one, I expected better performance and reliability. I assumed I would, and I did receive those two from July until October.

 

While in the middle of going through one of my ECE labs, I noticed sluggish performance from the drive. I assumed it was the Lab PC I was working on...what a grave mistake that was.

 

Yes I perform weekly backups for this drive. Daily should not be required because the only way I'd lose this thing is if I were held at gun point. Anyway cut to the chase, my files were all corrupted, but I didn't realize this until after I had replaced my backed up copies. Great.

RMA yaddah yaddah...new drive. Yay. Awesome.

 

At this point I am terrified to trust this SOB that I just got in the mail, as I should be from my previous experience. But being one who has read customer reviews...I've read horror stories and you come to realize that there are such things as flukes. That's what I hoped my experience was. Well reading the posts on this forum will tell anyone that my experience was not a fluke.

 

Back to the main plot, I copied true crypt to my server share where I keep all my apps at my fraternity house at Georgia Tech. Then I used my Dell Vista Laptop to format the drive NTFS mostly because I just want to have NTFS. No technical reasons really.

 

Copy all my stuff aka the remnants of my corrupted work files, labs, problem sets, etc back to the drive. Blazing fast. I am so excited. I don't even use the drive, but the next day when I come back to my computer, plug in the drive to work on a touch tone system in MATLAB and what do I get?

"Device not recognized blah blah"

 

At this point I am thinking noooo this is a bad dream. But it's not. Here I am complaining about a faulty product when I should be developing matlab code.

 

Anyway, before I am asked to play trial and error....

1. I have 10+ Flash drives. None of them give me these problems. The one that did, well it was DOA anyway.

 

My PC was built by me...and I've built 200+ systems since AMD Clawhammer technology was released.

 

Yes, my USB headers are outputting 5V at 500 mA or whatever it's supposed to be.

 

No there is no fault in my brand new laptop which was plugged in anyway so power saving schemes had nothing to do with manipulating the power on the USB bus.

 

No, I didn't chew on the drive until I felt components grinding against each other.

 

I've tested the devil device in a lot of different PCS now...believe me...Georgia Tech has a lot of systems on campus...try the KACB building we just got.

 

Anyway, no there are lots of little undergrads like myself with their usb flash drives happily working their souls away at monotinous engineering curricula.

 

In fact, the drive I previously had is preferable over this one because at least it was recognized all the time, the fact that a 98/me boot disk could not at the very least format it after it had corrupted all my data is apparently one of the many issues these little voyagers have.

 

So, the cute little RAM GUY gimmick is not working out for me. Having someone who willingly replaces anyones drive at times when it's apparent that the owner of the device doesn't know the difference between a USB or Serial port does't do much when the product apparently is flawed.

 

So my general findings through this horror story that is my life with Corsair products is that cheap flash drives that you can buy at Circuit City with a 35% profit margin in their favor with 60 day warranties are more reliable than devices that cost magnitudes more and have a 10 year warranty.

 

10 year warranty means nothing when the product fails all the time.

 

Check out Seagate. They repped the big 5 year warranty and their products were/are RELIABLE. Yes western digital followed suit in spite of the money they will be losing from replacing numerous drives from their desktop market segment.

 

Point: Warranty is nice, but Corsair will be bankrupt before this warranty expires if they continue to put out products such as the voyager series.

 

So RAM GUY please humor me so that my next RMA is not a Quasi DOA.

 

1. Rip open the product you intend to send me. Test it yourself. Hell use it for a few days. (Longer than this one lasted) Make sure it doesn't corrupt your data or give you Unrecognized device errors.

2. Send it to me...and I don't even care if it's in the nice new package. I appreciated the fact that you sent me an entire new product in new package. But I only sent you my drive and the cap...if that's all I get back...and it actually works, that would make me happier than an extra lanyard to hang a cat with and a cheap usb extension cable.

 

So RAM GUY, I challenge you to prove to me that your buck fifty costing Voyager GT 8GB is more reliable than my existing cheap <$50 flash drive that I've had for at least two years now.

 

Also, I am an aspiring CmpE major, so if Corsair still does business in say 3 years, I'll be happy to consult your flash products branch and then maybe we can work out these nasty little bugs.

 

Another note, yes I took perfect care of your flash drives, although you obviously are aware that people boil, wash, and runover them for fun. Pretend I'm going to write a review and I'm the owner of a large journalist website say-Tom's Hardware. Hand pick something that's not going to fail on me.

 

FYI the inspiration of this rant came to be during the hours I had to remake numerous ECE labs as well as grovel to TA's with my sob story, and the initiative came to me when I almost had the same thing happen again With my lovely RMA. Fortunately for me this time, it's hard to win back my trust.

 

I don't want to call your 1 800 number...you email me and you can get my number and call me...or just give me something that I can depend on.

 

EDIT: Please be advised that I solely despise your Flash Drive Segment. The rest of your products have proven themselves obviously to myself and others. Indeed, many a DoD Engineer will be happy because they have Corsair Memory Modules upgrading ther crappy old-under-funded-due-to-democrats-taking-defense-funds-and-giving-them-to-poor-people-who-use-it-to-buy-crack-laptops. Just as many over weight young people will probably die from obesity because they will never have to leave their computer systems because thanks to Corsair Memory, their stuff don't crash and WoW continues to play on.

[RAM GUY]

I am sorry that you are having problems and I will be happy to help you. But I would need you to call and ask for me at 800-205-7657 or send me an email with your phone number at ramguy@corsairmemory.com and please put Att Ram Guy and I will be happy to call you.

[MrIch]

@ggrimm please keep us updated about you issue. I am not sure if I should buy 16gb gt sitcks for an important project if these sticks are so unreliable!

[RAM GUY]

I don't mean any bad towards ggrimm, but I think he just been unlucky the return rate is still quite low (Less than 2%) and we do sell a high volume of these. But I would like to know how it turns out with him.