OCZ Rally 2GB Flash Drive

Performance:

As USB-based flash drives are most often used on the road transferring moderately sized files from one machine to another, for benchmarking today we used one of our notebook test systems. The software and hardware components making up this mobile unit are listed below.

Our focus for benchmarking these drives today were primarily for displaying the read and write capabilities of flash memory on the various units. For read benchmarking, we used hdparm which is primarily used for getting/setting hard disk parameters under Linux, but can also specify meaningful numbers once the -t parameter is specified along with the drive being utilized. As with all of our benchmarks, we ran each benchmark three times and then recorded the average of the results. For our write testing, we used the Linux time command to record the length of time required to copy a 104.5MB file from the IBM/Lenovo R52 ThinkPad hard drive we used in testing to the actual flash media. For results that are even more vigorous, we also timed how long it took to transfer 135 JPG picture files, with a total size of 106.2MB, from the hard drive over to the respective flash device. For the record, the 104.5MB file used was a Tape Archive GNU Zip (.tar.gz) of the 135 JPG files. Below is Ubuntu's Disk Manager detection of the OCZ Rally 2GB.

For comparison purposes today, although varying in storage capacity, we benchmarked the Corsair Flash Voyager (512MB), Transcend JetFlash 110 (1GB), Transcend JetFlash 2A (128MB), and a generic flash device (256MB). Prior to testing all drives were freshly formatted to FAT32. All of the devices used today comply with USB2.0 specifications. On the next page are our results.