New USB 3.0 Flash drives released

USB 3.0 is starting to become mainstream now with all the new Intel chipsets offering USB 3.0 support and the new AMD bulldozer is expected to bring mainstream USB 3.0 support at affordable prices. In response to this Corsair has just released its USB 3.0 “Voyager” models of USB memory sticks, whilst Kingston released its USB 3.0 “Data Traveler” USB memory sticks.

Corsair claims its new USB 3.0 Voyager sticks will be up to 4 times faster than older generation 2.0 models with speeds of around 120mb/s expected. Corsair also announced as expected they will be backward compatible with USB 2.0 ports.

Pricing is as follows:

• 8GB £16 ~
• 16GB £25 ~
• 32GB £60 ~

Kingston on the other hand claims read speeds of 100mb/s and write speeds of 70mb/s which is about 10-15% slower than what Corsair are claiming their memory sticks will perform at. Again these drives are backward compatible with USB 2.0.

Pricing is as follows:

• 16GB $77 ~ £50
• 32GB $116 ~ £70
• 64GB $213 ~ £130

Both manufacturers provide 5 year warranties as standard and claim full compatibility with all Vista, XP and 7 operating systems.