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Blazing Dual Channel Thumb Drive
Anonomisk Howard writes "The speed results from Big Bruin's review of OCZ's latest flash drive have me lusting for a new thumb drive. From the review: 'The OCZ Rally drive is not a radical new design, it does not look significantly different than any other USB 2.0 drive on the market, but then you plug it in and begin to use it. This thing smokes! The transfer times shown in the charts are what this drive is all about. If you want the fastest, sleekest, and most extreme drive currently on the market, this is the one to get.'"
You'd probably like this one.
Yeah, aren't those fuckers tight at first?
For Linux based DNS servers, Routers, reverse proxy web servers, proxy servers, and other mostly static disk content Linux based devices --- boot from Linux, give you the ability to change on the fly (unlike live CD's), and be cheap and effective in most scenarios (as long, of course, as you kept /var and /tmp in a ramdrive to prevent overusing your flash media (save both volumes to a .tgz and store them to flash at shutdown, and restore to ramdrive at bootup))
Slashdot frequently gets spamvertisements like these, but it seems that the product being spammed is more the website than the stupid drive itself - judging by the fact that the submitter's URL is the same as that of the story, this is clearly just a ploy to drive people to his site to spike his ad revenue.
1. Write review of stupid product/service.
2. Submit to Slashdot
3. Profit
4. Goto 1
Slashdot's story queue is probably overflowing with trash like this "article." I can't believe that the one they accepted was about a "blazing" thumb drive. How fast can a fucking thumb drive be, and who fucking cares?
rooooar
Geeks buy things that are smaller than the ones they already have. Vendors have given themselves room to un-grow and make more profit later on by reducing the size.
If you want a small USB drive (size of 2 pennies next to each other) that holds up to 1 GB, and comes with a credit card holder that can fit 2 memory sticks in your wallet, then check out the intelligent stick by PQI. You can find it on newegg here. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16820214009. I swear by this thing, it is so convienent to fit in your wallet with the credit card sized holder that it comes with. I have had mine for almost a year now and I absolutely love it. Like you said, these thumb drives could be a lot smaller then the're being made to be. PQI seems to be the only company that makes them this small. You can find a review here complete with specs. http://www.extrememhz.com/Intellistick20-p1.shtml (I'm probably gonna get modded down for being offtopic, but I figured since we're talking about thumb drives, I might as well mention it. Cheers.
If you google around you'll find this thing really is freaking fast . This isn't just an ad, it is the fastest flash drive around. And you can get them for $25 + S/H . I've got one and I must say, they are solid (metal casing) and noticably faster than any other flash drive I've used.
I bought one of these things yesterday at a computer store in Ottawa. $89 (cdn) for a 1-gig dual channel Rally flash drive and a short USB cable.
(1) It's small. About as small as any thumb drive I've seen.
(2) The outer shell of the drive AND THE CAP is made of thin metal and hard plastic. The cap contains a PLASTIC PLUG which mimics the shape of a USB port. The result is that the cap fits very snugly onto the drive's USB connector and has virtually zero chance of falling off.
In addition, the loop for hanging the drive around your neck is on the thumb part, NOT on the cap like some brain-damaged designs. Its made of hard plastic and seems unlikely to break under any normal circumstances.
Wonder why they didn't test it against some of the other high speed flash drives? We use the Lexar Lightnings at work. They are rated about the same as this one. I haven't benchmarked them myself, but they are noticeably faster than any others we have tried, plus they come with very nice sync and encryption software.
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
AnandTech has a more comprehensive review of many flash drives, and the OCZ is far from being the fastest.
4 9
Although it could be considered the cheapest fast drive in a way...
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=25
The results seem to disagree with the review of the Transcend Jetflash here http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/index .html
"At 27 MB/sec maximum read transfer rate, Transcend has set the bar pretty high for its competition."
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
1. 17MB/sec. http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/review.php?item= oczrally&file=1H ow%20fast%20is%20USB%202.02 5050KLA360_2.htmlf lash_drives-09.html
2. 60 MB/sec. http://www.usb-2-0.com/what-is-usb-2-0.html#2.%20
3. 60 MB/sec. http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/HDS7
4. 11 MB/sec. http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/usb_
5. 35 MB/sec. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2515
It's 1.5 times as fast as your average flash, and only half as slow as your typical USB hard drive.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Data Stolen From Storage Review:
Transfer Rate - Begin (MB/s)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 (400 GB SATA) - 69.8
Western Digital Caviar WD3200JD (320 GB SATA) - 66.5
Maxtor MaXLine III (300 GB SATA) - 65.7
Western Digital Caviar WD2500JD (250 GB SATA) - 60.6
Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 (400 GB SATA) - 60.4
Samsung SpinPoint P80 (160 GB SATA) - 60.2
Transfer Rate - End (MB/s)
Western Digital Caviar WD3200JD (320 GB SATA) - 40.8
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 (400 GB SATA) - 39.9
Western Digital Caviar WD2500JD (250 GB SATA) - 37.8
Maxtor MaXLine III (300 GB SATA) - 37.2
Samsung SpinPoint P80 (160 GB SATA) - 36.5 |
Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 (400 GB SATA) - 32.9
Looks like the flash drives still have a way to go to compete with current hard drives data rates.