OCZ ATV 4GB USB Flash Drive Review

Performance testing was done on a Dell laptop with USB 2.0 running Windows XP SP2 with an Intel 2.5Ghz mobile processor and 1GB of RAM.  Read tests were measured with SimliSoft’s HDTach, while real-world write speeds were tested by copying a 800MB contiguous file to the drive and measuring the time to calculate the average write.

The ATV surpasses my previous favorite, the A-Data Nobility PD17 2GB flash drive.  It’s top burst speed is just slightly lower than A-data’s offering,  but average read is slightly higher; so is close enough to safely say that they have the same read speed.

The OCZ takes a slight lead when it comes to write performance, as it lays down nearly 7MB a second on its rubberized bits. I was surprised that this drive didn’t have better write performance given that this stick uses dual-channel technology.  We didn’t achieve anywhere near OCZ’s advertised 14MB / second write speed, but it still performs better than any other consumer-level drive.

While the Corsair Padlock is a good performing drive, it is only average in comparison to the other’s read speeds.  Realistically there is only a 5 to 10 second difference between the slowest and the fastest drive when copying 500 megabytes of data.  If you constantly fill up and relieve your drive to its capacity on a frequent basis then these few seconds could translate into minutes.