OCZ Rally 2GB Thumb Drive

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by Rob Williams on October 3, 2005 in Storage

Thumb Drives are not usually the most exciting products on the market. It’s no doubt though, that they can be extremely useful when backing data up.. especially at a high speed. We are taking a look at the new OCZ Rally drive, which promises to leave the competitors in the dust.

Page 3 – Testing


To test this baby out, we used a couple programs that are perfect for benching thumb drives and other flash media. We used Sandra 2005, and the included Flash Drive Benchmark, and also HD Tach RW 3. Both programs test out the Read and Write speeds, and then give us an overall average. In addition, I have done some real world benchmarks, with a good ole fashioned stop watch.

For unknown reasons, my desktop doesn’t want to utilize the 2.0 USB ports it has, so I am using my notebook for the testing. It is a Dell Inspiron 5150, P4 HT 2.8GHz, 512MB PC2700, 60GB 7200RPM, GeForce 5200FX Go.

With this review, we are starting a new way to benchmark thumb drives, so we won’t have any comparisons except the preset comparisons in Sandra.

HD Tach RW 3

We ran all three of the main tests with HD Tach for both the Reads and Writes. For Read/Write, the higher the result the better. The opposite is for Latency, where the lower the result, the better.

Now those are some amazing scores. 26.3MB/s Read and 18MB/s Write! At those speeds, this drive could be filled in less than 2 minutes.

Sandra 2005

Real World Benches

To do real world benchmarks, I tested in Windows and Linux to look for any speed differences. The differences are definitely there; Linux can take up to twice as long for the same task. It could be that SuSE is using it as a 1.1 USB and not telling me, or that it’s due to poor drivers.

How I timed these: I drag the files/folders to the drive drive, and as soon as I click Copy, I start the timer. With Windows specifically, after clicking Copy, it would take at least 10 seconds before a copy box even showed it’s face, for whatever reason. In Linux it started copying almost immediately.

Let’s pay more attention to the Windows benches, since that’s where most people will use their drives. I am very impressed with the fast speed of this drive. It’s apparent the drive loves large files, and will write them at a much faster speed than smaller files. We copied a 1GB file (Half-Life 2 game file) in 1:26! In the last test, which included 964 files, they all ranged in size from 55Kb to 700MB. Considering how many files there were, and at varying sizes, 2:16 to complete the task is amazing.


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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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