OCZ Rally 2 8GB USB Flash Drive

- Picked one up from newegg for only $14 shipped after $10 MIR.
- Yeah sure USB flash drives are getting bigger, cheaper, and more of a commodity every day. In my case I was looking for only one very specific feature: performance. I wanted something that was fast at read (which most are) and write so I could run portable firefox better with cache turned on. U3 was a good idea but apps just aren't updated frequently enough so I'm back to running apps from portableapps which are updated frequently. I've gone as far as uninstalling U3 from my sandisk (it actually removes the fake cd-rom partition too). Size was secondary since apps don't take up that much space. I installed almost every portableapp I thought I might ever want to use and only used up a little over 1GB of space. That still leaves me 7GB to transfer files between the office and home.
- There are some very fast usb flash drives out there but many are discontinued and hard to find with pretty high ebay prices. Others like the ocz rally 2 turbo are incredibly fast but also extremely expensive. I felt the rally 2 was a nice compromise and seemed like a relatively good value.
- I hate the cap. I really prefer a retractable connector like on the Sandisk cruzer micro. There isn't even any way to attach the cap to the rest of the flash drive.
- It has a nice aluminum body that feels very durable.
- I used ATTO Disk Benchmark since it's free and does write tests too. I'll compare it to the sandisk cruzer since that is what I'll be replacing.

Windows XP Pro 32bit:

Sandisk	OCZ Rally 2

As you can see read speeds on the OCZ was pretty impressive at ove 28 MB/s read on larger transfers. It was a bit disappointing in write speeds. I guess the dual channel architecture does help a bit.

Vista 32bit:

Sandisk	OCZ Rally 2

Yeah something is messed up. I even tried a usb external hard drive and read speeds never went above 17MB/s. Either Vista is messed up and basically giving me only half of the expected usb 2.0 speeds or ATTO doesn't like vista. I'm leaning toward this being one of the stupid sucky aspects of Vista.

Recommended especially if you are going to primarily use it in a windows xp environment. I can really feel the difference in portable firefox. Things do feel snappier. If you are running vista then I would recommend you run some usb benchmarks to see if you are capped somehow like I am.