Without any doubt, Corsair's USB sticks are legendary: you can cook them in coffee, freeze, wash, benchmark while a two ton SUV is on top... but not everyone can be as resilient. Manufacturing may be on very high level, but if you manufacture a million products - even if your yield is brilliantly high 98.5% - that will still mean 15,000 products will come faulty and the question is how the company is going to handle those 15,000 people. Buying a product from a large company doesn't mean that you'll receive excellent service.
Back in late 2008, we purchased a Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB stick at what we believed to be a fairly good deal. After a few weeks of use, the stick came unglued. For those unfamiliar with the Corsair Flash Voyager, the Voyager is simply a standard USB stick PCB and connector which are encased by thick rubber housing. This thick rubber housing is then glued to the PCB and flash modules and is hopefully kept in place within the life of the stick.
After a few more months of what would be considered as light use, the second RMA’d stick also came unglued as well. In both instances, the outer shell simply came off of the PCB part of the USB stick when trying to remove the device from any USB port on a computer. While we can say that the rubber housing definitely protects the stick from being broken when dropped, we are not necessarily convinced that these sticks can survive normal use simply because of the fact that we've had two unglued sticks in a row.
This is our second unglued Corsair's Flash Voyager 16GB
Doing a quick search, we also found a few others out there that also had issues with their sticks coming unglued a few months after usage. We also found quite a few people who had issues with their USB connectors breaking or bending, but unfortunately we did not experience this so we cannot confirm that this is also an issue.
Besides the regular RMA, we also contacted Corsair regarding our story and tried to find out whether there is a larger volume of unglued sticks or not. We got an answer from a long time serving employee Mr. Robert Pearce [Senior Technical Marketing Specialist] who told us that they haven't heard about this issue and that it was probably limited to a very small number of units. Situations such as these fall under Corsairs' limited lifetime warranty and the products are automatically replaced. According to Robert, an unglued stick "falls under our warranty and we'd be happy to replace any defective units."
© 2009 - 2010 Bright Side Of News*, All rights reserved.
