Performance

We compared the OCZ Rally 1GB to the following USB devices:

• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

OCZ is using "dual-channel" technology in the Rally USB Sticks. Two flash memory chips are connected in parallel, so data is written to and read from both chips at the same time, which should considerably increase transfer rates. This is a clever idea since it does not require faster flash chips to be developed, you will just need a little bit more interface logic and space for a second chip. Expect to see dual-channel technology in a lot of future USB drives.

We used HDTach in the following two benchmarks.


As promised, the read bandwidth of the USB Rally is exceptional. Only the Thermaltake MUSE is faster, but it's not a USB stick, just a housing for a 3.5" harddisk.


When it comes to access times, the Sandisk Cruzer is a little bit faster than the OCZ Rally, but such a small difference is hardly noticable, especially not with the usage patterns of USB sticks.

To get a feeling how the speed with different sized files is, we used the ATTO disk benchmark.


As you can see the write performance of the drive is quite less than the reading speed, but still very good. Another conclusion we can draw from here, is that the drive is considerably slower when moving small files, but who has 1 GB of small files anyway.