Add to Reddit
Using The Rally
Like all USB flash memory drives, the OCZ Rally drives were a piece of cake to use. In newer operating systems like Windows XP, it's pretty much plug and play. In Windows 95/98 though, you will need a USB driver, which you can download here.
When we plugged the OCZ Rally drives into our testbed, Windows XP automatically detected their presence and initialized them. Once initialized, they were ready for use.
When you plug the Rally into any USB port, the rear end lights up with a bright blue light. That's the status LED.
)
It stays lit when the drive is powered and blinks whenever there is activity. That's a useful feature because it warns you against removing the Flash Voyager when there is still activity.
Here are the actual drive capacities of the three OCZ Rally drives, with the Corsair Flash Voyager thrown in for comparison.
Flash Drive |
Capacity |
| Corsair Flash Voyager 512MB | 519,798,784 bytes |
| OCZ Rally 512MB | 523,976,704 bytes |
| OCZ Rally 1GB | 1,048,264,704 bytes |
| OCZ Rally 2GB | 2,096,824,320 bytes |
Test Bed
| Processor | AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (o/c to 1.9GHz) |
| Motherboard | ABIT NF7-S Rev. 2.0 |
| Memory | Two 512MB Kingston HyperX DDR SDRAM |
| Hard Drive | 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard disk 400GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard disk |
| Graphics Card | ABIT GeForce4 Ti4200 OTES |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP1 |
| Power Supply | Chieftec 420W |
| USB Flash Drives | OCZ Rally 2GB (USB 2.0) OCZ Rally 1GB (USB 2.0) OCZ Rally 512MB (USB 2.0) Corsair Flash Voyager 512MB (USB 2.0) |
Testing The OCZ Rally Drives
The sustained write speed of any USB flash memory drive is a very important aspect to consider before you decide to buy it. That's because a slow write speed can limit the usefulness of large flash memory drives. Imagine writing 500MB of data at just 100KB/s!
For the read and write tests, we used our proprietary filesets. Here are the details :
Filesets |
Size
(bytes) |
Files |
| Large Files (MP3) | 200,007,492 |
35 MP3 files |
| Small Files (Documents) | 200,007,960 |
2004 HTML files 41 PPT files 124 DOC files 162 XLS files |
OCZ boasts an amazing read speed of 23-28MB/s and a write speed of 15-17MB/s for these drives, thanks to their dual-channel technology. In flash memory terms, they would be considered as 100X to 112X flash drives. Let's see if that's true!
<<< Dual Channel Technology, USB 2.0 Support, Accessories : Previous Page | Next Page : Read Performance, Write Performance >>>
