The features are all well and good, but what really determines a USB drive’s usefulness is its read and write performance. USB drives have come a long way over a relatively short period of time. It was only two years ago when a good flash drive could read at a rate of 10 Megabytes per second, and today’s flash drives are expected to reach 25MB or more.
Due to the nature of flash memory, it cannot be written to in the same way as volotile memory (like your computer’s DDR2 RAM), so a clever way to increase throughput is to make it dual-channel (as most motherboards have implemented to increase performance).
Write performance becomes increasingly important as flash drives increase their capacity. If write performance didn’t increase beyond 6MB a second, then it would take between 45 minutes to an hour to fill up a 16GB flash drive. More and more people are using their drives for “portable applications” such as portable FireFox (and even portable Photoshop), so write performance is especially crucial for this use.
To test the OCZ Rally2 Turbo, we used Sandra 2007, HDTach, ATTO 2.02, and HD Bench 3.30 to test the drive’s read and write performance. We also enabled “Optimal Performance” in Windows Vista, and verified that the USB hub was running in high-speed mode. We tested the USB drives on several test systems, and received different results on different platforms. We contacted OCZ’s support about this issue, and they confirmed that USB drive speed is greatly dependant on the motherboard’s Southbridge chip, and that nVidia’s 680i chipset is currently the fastest platform for USB drive throughput.
We tested on Windows Vista (both 64-bit and 32-bit) as well as Windows XP SP2 on several different Intel and nVidia platforms, including Intel’s 975 chipset, Intel 965, nVidia 680i, VIA chipsets.
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OCZ Rally2 Turbo Performance Anlysis
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The peculiar thing about these benchmark results is that the read speed maxed out on the Intel 975 chipset on Vista 64. This edifies the point that USB drive performance varies depending on your motherboard’s chipset (and possibly the OS you’re running). In either case, we were able to confirm OCZ’s claim that this drive can reach a 30 Megabyte-per-second read and write speed, which is phenominal for a USB drive. Your mileage may vary depending on your chipset and operating system, which is a topic that will certainly spawn another quality OCmodshop article.
