The Corsair Flash Survivor (32GB) USB drive has military written all over it. From the aircraft-grade aluminum cover to the silly dog tag included in the package, not to mention the tough-guy name, Corsair wants you to see the Survivor as the ultimate in USB flash-drive storage for extreme conditions, from water to sand. The drive is no speed de-mon at reading and writing data, but it delivers when it comes to protecting its contents—as long as you don't lose the screw-on cap.

We tested the 32GB Survivor, which costs a heart-stopping $229.99 list—but that works out to $7.19 per GB, a much better deal than the 4GB version at $12.50 per GB ($49.99 list), if you care to look at it that way. The Survivor also has 8GB ($79.99 list) and 16GB ($129.99 list) versions.

When the cap is on, the drive looks like a steel roll of Life Savers. Unscrew the cap—which itself is 70mm long—and you'll find the drive takes up the entire shaft. The drive it-self is a modest 65mm by 11mm by 8mm (HWD), which means it fits most USB ports without a problem, but the final 13mm at the base of the drive—the end opposite the USB connector—is as large in diameter as the cap (22mm at the widest spot). That's because that end holds the rubber waterproof seal and threads, the key to the device's impervious-ness to harm. Nearby is the blue LED that blinks to indicate data transfer.

How impervious is the Survivor? I didn't drive over it with the minivan, but I did sub-merge it in water for a couple of hours with no ill effects. Corsair says the drive can go as deep underwater as 200 meters. It's also rated as shockproof, so I dropped it down the stairs a couple of times, with no ill effects. Keep in mind that all of this has to be done with the cap screwed on. Without it, the device is as vulnerable to moisture, dirt, or being crushed as any other USB drive.

The Survivor isn't big on extras. You get a handy 2-foot USB extension cable for those hard-to-reach ports, a ball chain, and the aforementioned dog tag stamped with a Corsair logo. The chain fits through a small hole in the cap so you can wear the drive around your neck, but it does nothing to tether the cap and drive together. That's a shame, since this drive is so dependent on its cap for its vaunted protection. Wearing the drive around your neck isn't the most comfortable thing. It's not heavy, since the body is aluminum, but the bulk means that if you wear it under clothes, you will get some odd looks.

Installed on the drive is TrueCrypt 4.3, which works under Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. The software can encrypt an entire storage device, like the Survivor USB drive, so that only the user who set it up can get access. You'll be better off going directly to www.truecrypt.org and downloading the latest version, 5.1a—it's free, because TrueCrypt is an open-source project. Though it's not included on the Survivor drive, there's also a Mac OS X version of TrueCrypt that you can download from the site. The drive works with Mac OS 9 on up, and even Linux 2.4 and up.

Though not abysmal, the Survivor's performance—a 21.7-megabyte-per-second (MBps) read speed and 10.8-MBps write—ranks toward the bottom (in both read and write) among the USB flash drives I've recently reviewed. The Editors' Choice SanDisk Cruzer Contour delivered a 25.7-MBps read speed—which was not even the best in our last USB drive roundup—and a 16.9-MBps write speed. Nonetheless, the Survivor is fast enough for Windows Vista to recognize the drive as ReadyBoost capable when you plug it in, though the package doesn't state that.

For all its physical invincibility, the Survivor is a spectacular performer. And if you lose its military-style cap, you'll wish you'd just gone with the faster, less-expensive competi-tion. With it, however, you can take your data just about anywhere for a decade (the length of its limited warranty) or longer.

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