Flash Voyager 64 GB USB Drive

I was excited to find my Flash Voyager 64 GB USB drive in the mail today! My old 8 GB drive was falling apart and the new high capacity drive arrived just in time.

The Flash Voyager is the highest capacity USB drive I could find on the market and even though reviews claimed slow transfer speeds, I ordered it anyway. Upon arrival, I put it to the test using a 80MB graphic file.

Transferring from my hard drive to my old 8 GB drive took 18 seconds. Transferring that same file to the Flash Voyager took only 13 seconds, so as you can imagine, I was pleasantly surprised at the speed increase!

Besides the speed increase, I was also impressed at the rubber coating that protects the drive. I threw the drive up high and let it land on a hard surface multiple times without any problems – data intact.

When I ordered this drive, I though that it came with built in encryption software, something I must have and was disappointed to find nothing of the sort. The company recommended a third party open source software package called TrueCrypt (a great software package : ) – but it takes a very long time for the initial setup, over an hour with my 8GB drive and I can only imagine at the amount of time needed for the 64GB drive.

For those looking for a quick and easy way to encrypt their drive using Windows XP or Vista, simply do the following:

Click Start, Run and type in ‘MMC’. You’ll see ‘Console Root’ pop up, click on File, Add/Remove Snap-In, click Add…then double click on Certificates,  select My user account, then Finish, then Close, then OK.

You’ll see Certificates, double click it. Now you’ll see Personal, double click that, now you’ll see Certificates, click that one and in the window to your right, you’ll see Issued To (your user name or something like this). Right click on the name and choose All Tasks, Export and save the key somewhere you’ll remember (my documents, etc.. but NOT on the flash drive).

What you just did was create a key that will allow you to open the folder on the USB drive that we are going to create next. This is the easy part.

The Flash Voyager is 64 GB, so in order to copy files over 4 GB in size, you need to format it as an NTFS partition.

Click Start, Settings, Control Panel and in the control panel, select Administrative Tools, then Computer Management, then Disk Management, then Right Click on your USB Drive (make sure it’s the correct drive!) and select Format, then NTFS.

Once the drive had been formated, create a subdirectory on it (use file manager and navigate to the drive, right click, choose new, choose folder and give it a name), right click on the new folder (subdirectory) and choose Advanced, then ‘Encrypt contents to secure data’, then OK, then OK again; you’ll know the folder is encrypted because to turns green.

Now you have your Flash Voyager 64 GB USB drive set up with a folder that encrypts anything you put into it. Microsoft claims that this encryption is completly safe from hackers!

Great product, great price – worth buying!

Jim.