Ever have a bad IT day? You know, the kind of day where you accidentally crash the server and lose terabytes of your coworkers' files? Or the kind of day when you accidentally drop your thumb drive containing a vital PowerPoint presentation into your morning coffee? Believe it or not, I've had such days. Good thing I was field testing a new rugged (and thankfully water resistant) flash thumb drive, or I'd have been in trouble.Lemme tell ya, the Corsair Flash Survivor GT does what it sets out to do: protect your data from the elements (and sheer clumsiness, which is something I have been blessed with).

The Flash Survivor comes in two varieties, 8 Gigabyte and 4 Gigabyte. Both sizes are housed in milled aluminum cylinders that are about the size of a 12-gauge shotgun shell. The casings are tough. We're talking go-ahead-and-throw-it-down-a-set-of-stairs tough. They are water resistant to 200 meters, too. And they are fast. I loaded a 50 Megabyte file to the Flash Survivor GT in 5 seconds (with a USB 2.0 port). A 7.35 Gigabyte iMovie file loaded in just under 8 minutes.

I decided to test the toughness by seriously abusing this little thumb drive. I was downright mean to it. After loading a variety of files to the drive, I sealed it up and set out to see just how much punishment it could take.

First, I threw (not tossed) it down a set of steel and concrete stairs. It bounced down two flights before coming to a stop. Next, I pitched it as far as I could in an empty parking lot. While I certainly won't be putting Roger Clemens to shame any time soon, the drive sailed through the air end-over-end with a gracelessness all its own before bouncing about 50 feet on the pavement. I briefly contemplated driving over it with my truck, but decided that might be taking too much of a chance. (The literature doesn't state that it can withstand 2 tons of pressure.)

After kicking it around for a while a la Pele, I decided to test its water resistance. I submerged it in about a foot of water and left it there over night. Surely if my abuse of the Flash Survivor had created any breaks in the O-ring seals, 10 hours in water would be enough to find them.

The next morning I hauled it out and dried it off. Despite some scrapes on the outside, the Flash Survivor lived up to its marketing. I unscrewed it, plugged it into my PC and found all of my files intact and usable.

Of course, it wasn't a few days later that I accidentally dropped the thumb drive into my coffee while having breakfast with a friend (as I said, I am a klutz). I had just finished telling him how tough it was. He ended up with a real-life demonstration instead. While I may have burned my fingers fishing out the drive, my data was just fine.

And at the end of the day, that's what matters.