ivplay's Full Review: OCZ Rally2 (4 GB) USB 2.0 Flash Drive (OCZUSBR2DC-...
With more traveling goes more gadget needs, or so I tell my wife. Based on this absolute truth, I recently bought a new Flash Memory drive to allow for extensive file transfer between work sites and home. As I am working on a large engineering effort to expand a plant, the space requirements for this drive will be large due to many CAD drawings, bid documents and specification sheets. Looking around I found the best capacity (and hopefully performance) for the buck in the OCZ Rally2 4GB USB2 Flash Drive.
In the package
I went to my long-time trusted e-tailer, Newegg, and found the Rally2 for the low, low price of $68 (it will be $20 in six months; meh…). Not being one to pass up a good deal, I bought it and had it shipped directly to my office. In two short days the package arrived and I was off and running.
The harder-than-hell-to-get-into plastic package includes the 4GB drive, a neck strap/lanyard, a quick start guide and a USB 3' cable. The drive is sized right for my usage at a little over two and half inches long by a little over a half inch wide and less than half an inch in depth. Think about the size of the once popular Sandisk Cruzers… The drive itself is encased in a very durable aluminum case with a less than form fitting cap and has an annoying orange LED light on the end of it. I say it is annoying as OCZ designers decided that they would have the darn thing remain lit at all times and only blink off when the computer is accessing memory. The LED is so bright that I find it distracting, even now three months or so after the initial purchase. I would much prefer that the LED remained dark until accessed, but we can't have everything we want, can we?
OCZ is a familiar name to many in the memory industry as they produce some of the higher performing RAM available for performance systems. Based upon this reputation I was salivating the see how well this performed in read/write times. The drive is compatible with all versions of Windows, but keep in mind that with Windows 98/SE you will need to download and install a driver.
Tested Performance
USB drives are pretty ubiquitous anymore, so there should be hardly any explanation needed. Plug it into a USB port and your computer should identify it, load the drivers and map it to a drive letter. Simple. You are ready to copy, paste and create files within your new toy.
As far as limitations of the drive, there are a few albeit minor ones. Don't buy this expecting to fill it up with 4 GB of files. The usable space on the drive is only 3.83 GB due to the difference in nomenclature between drive manufacturers and OS programmers. It isn't something wrong with your drive, and no, you didn't get ripped off. The OCZ Rally 2 comes preformatted with a FAT file system to allow it to compute with the large majority of computer systems out there. If you choose to do so you can format this on your own PC to whatever file system you would like (such as NTFS which might give you a performance boost) but drives smaller than 4GB don't bump up against the restrictions associated with FAT anyway.
OCZ claims on their website that the Rally2 can write to the disk at a blazing 28 MB/s and read as high as 15 MB/s. I realize that these would be burst speeds in both cases, but they are pretty quick for a USB 2.0 drive. Not one to trust the vendor literature, I popped the drive in and ran HD Tach 3, a drive speed testing utility that has served me well over the past few years. HD Tach reported 22.1 MB/s burst speed for read, which isn't all that far from the stated max of 28 MB/s. The disappointment set in when I noted that the average read speed is a measly 3.8 MB/s. What is this? Why is this so low? I couldn't really explain it, but in real-world transfer I seemed to notice a similar trend. Transferring a smaller file to the drive would result in a very quick transfer as you would expect. The larger the file the more choked up the drive seemed to get, and it didn't seem to be linear to the size increase. In other words, it seemed as though a file that was twice the size would take more like four times the transfer time.
The disappointment didn't stop there. I noticed on one computer that the drive had a CPU utilization of 30%. That can't be right… I ran HD Tach on another computer and found that while the CPU utilization wasn't quite so high it was still in the 20% range. Strange… Checking the Random Access I noted that this was quite high at 70.2ms… Further exploration showed that the drive had a pretty good sequential read curve until a certain point and then it would drop off to nothing… What was going on here? Thinking the drive may be fragmented I ran defrag. Aha! Defrag reported that a file on the drive was corrupt! I deleted the offending file and re-ran the tests to find numbers much closer to what would be expected; 24MB/s burst speed with an average read speed of 18 MB/s and CPU utilization of 3%. Success, at last!
Real World Experience
You might be wondering what I use this for and how often I use it. I bought this to transfer work and home software apps and files back and forth. I have PStart, RoboForm2Go, Mobile Firefox, Mobile Thunderbird and Mobile Sunbird on the drive in addition to a mobile media player. Add in some media files and all the data for the three above programs and I have used about a quarter of the drive's capacity. For my work I do a lot with AutoCAD and other design applications. The files for this type of application can get very large with multiple layers, and I have been successful keeping the most up to date design on my Rally2. This comes in very handy when traveling between the engineering office, the plant and corporate headquarters. Additionally I use this drive to backup my quicken documents to ensure I always have the most up to date financials wherever I am.
I use this everyday, almost all day. With the portable firefox on the drive I don't have to worry about having my favorites and bookmarks with me when browsing, and with portable thunderbird I have my home emails at the click of a mouse. Roboform helps me maintain my sanity by remembering all my passwords and personal information, and portable sunbird acts as a rudimentary calendar of sorts. Using these with the Rally2 allow me to cover my tracks at work or on public computers as the browsing footprints are never left on the host computer. The space capacity of the Rally2 allows me to do all of this while also using this for transporting work documents I would otherwise have needed a separate flash drive for.
Overall
OCZ has come through with a speedy drive once I figured out the one file was corrupted and killing the performance. I can't rightly say if the OCZ drive corrupted the file or if it was corrupted during transfer, etc. but I have had no other problems to date. The size is nice as I can fit two drives in neighboring USB ports, and the aluminum casing makes this one sturdy drive. The cap isn't very form fitting and I keep expecting to lose it, although it is still hanging on. The orange light is annoying as can be, but for the size and performance I can put up with it. I would recommend buying the OCZ Rally2 for your needs, as it has worked well for me under some heavy usage for the past three months.
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