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.'"

Comments

pe

[uberjoe]

If only my wife were this interested in speed.

Re:pe

[jtorkbob]

I disagree.

I had 'nerd' in my job title once. There is a light saber in my car. I laugh at things like 'OCT 31 = DEC 25'. I have read User Friendly daily for 7 years. I alternate between science fiction and science fact in my reading. I have a room containing approximately 1400 feet of spare cables. I throw parties (by myself) for important milestones in the up-time of my servers.

My wife is not a nerd. She's a social genius who works with old folks - kind of the opposite of a nerd. She watches "Top Model". She owns a hair straightening device. Perhaps most importantly, she is unaffected by caffeine.

We met online, of course, and have been married for almost six years. Nerddom doesn't preclude marriage - it just makes it harder to achieve.

What They're Not Teaching In Sex Ed...

[__aaclcg7560]

... lusting for a new thumb drive ...

Ok, someone has a problem. :P

Burn, baby, burn!

[Anonymous Coward]

"This thing smokes!"
Isn't that the reason people stopped using those xbox cables?

Just what I need.....

[physman_wiu]

...another USB pen drive to loose the cap off of.

Re:Just what I need.....

[physman_wiu]

yeah, but they wear out just like a woman

but why

[JustNiz]

Why do they make these usb key drives so friggin' big? THe electronics inside is probably like 1cm square.

Whats with all the redundant plastic?

Re:but why

[fembots]

Maybe to make sure you don't misplace it too easily?

I'm sure James Bond uses the same thing but with a smaller form factor.

Re:but why

[iethree]

if every thumb drive was 1cm square, you would lose within a week. the drives right now are just the right size to slip in a pocket or on a key ring, if they were any smaller they'd just be impractical.

Re:but why

[Minwee]

They could probably make it as big as a Tic-Tac, but then people would either lose or swallow them.

Getting USB 2.0 compatability _and_ a fresh minty flavour would drive the prices through the roof so it's just not going to happen.

Re:but why

[Red Flayer]

Others have pointed out that it's easy to lose a very small item.

Another factor is ease of use. I personally have sausage-fingers, so something 1-cm square is very awkward to handle. I'm sure other slashdotters have the same problem. Throw in the fact that I enjoy the occasional adult beverage (or three) in the evening, and that teeny drive is almost impossible to use.

Also, many USB drives are recessed, it's hard to grasp something that doesn't stick out past the surface of your case at least a cm or two.

Finally, a rectangle is much better than a square, it's easier to figure out which is the business end. And since you're going rectangular, it makes sense to use a shape that's visually pleasing -- slimline, not clunky.

So, to sum up: don't wanna lose it, ergonomics, and product acceptance.

P.S. The drive reviewed has an aluminum casing, not plastic.

Re:but why

[absinthminded64]

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.

Re:but why

[Randall311]

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.

Gonna Order One Today

[RapidEye]

I love my thumb drives, but trying to do "disk" intensive work like BIG spreadsheets can be a bit pokie. It looks like this is just what the Dr Ordered!

How much?

[ArchieBunker]

How much do advertisements like this cost? Sure could use some publicity like this for my business. That summary sounds like it was pasted from some webstore. The most extreme thumbdrive? Please.

Re:How much?

[Evro]

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?

Re:How much?

[Homology]

How much do advertisements like this cost? Sure could use some publicity like this for my business. That summary sounds like it was pasted from some webstore. The most extreme thumbdrive? Please.

On top of that it was just plain stupid, and as usual the "geeks" of /. just fell for it.

Re:How much?

[Man Eating Duck]

...who fucking cares?

The 1337 haxx0r that, after social-engineering your receptionist, your security people and your colleagues, wants to get a copy of your customer database and your shadow file before you get back from getting another coffee :)

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a fucking advertisement. Its written like a circular for my local computer store, not an objective review/analysis.

Re:How much?

[TheRaven64]

as usual the "geeks" of /. just fell for it.

Hahaha! You don't think we actually clicked on the link and read TFA do you? You must, as they say, be new here...

uuhh.. beavis..

[jrexilius]

lusting after "sleek extreme thumb drives" and "drooling over transfer speeds" speaks of serious lack of girlfriendage...

But but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Isn't the point of USB keys to make it easy to exchange files with other people? unless you're in a real hurry (like, say, you want to give photos to a friend, he's not home, you break in anyway, proceed to the computer, but your friend's rottweiler saw you and is coming at you) who really cares if it takes one more minute to transfer those files?

The only things important to me are data integrity (a non-issue with 99% of the drives, even the cheapest ones), and a housing solid enough to make the thing survive the odd collection of objects it live with in my bag. Most other people who use these drives don't want anything else from them either.

Re:But but

[docbrown42]

Some of us aren't "most people", and would like more/faster thumb drives. Personally, I run Portable Thunderbird off of one of mine, and I wouldn't mind a bit faster transfer speeds...especially when I have to backup 100+megs of email. Not to mention that opening a large pdf file off of a thumb drive can be a slow process.

Just because you use your thumb drive one way, don't assume everyone else uses theirs the same way.

Sponsors?

[Valiss]

Actually, my boss is looking to get in more advertising for our company. Appearantly, he wants me to do the web ad stuff. Is it actually possible to sponsor an article on /. or do we have to use the banners?

I figured you were being sarcastic, but honestly I've seen so many 'articles' on this site, that maybe you were being serious.

Um, so what

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I mean, unless this kind of performance is built into a camera, video or music player then who cares that it takes 20 seconds less time to transfer a few hundred megs of file to a flash drive. I have never found myself wishing my thumb drive was faster for transfering content.

Also, probably a big also, most systems hard drives significantly underperform, so are you even going to get that much improvement by a faster USB drive? No matter what I have done, I have never gotten sustained 48MB/s transfer from any IDE hard drive.

Well, if your a performance queen, then I guess you need the fastest and bestest, but its kind of wasted R&D to make a USB drive smoking fast. How about putting them skills into making desktop hard drives smoking fast instead of smoking hot and underperforming.

Aluminum vs. Plastic

[Red Flayer]

The review makes a big deal of the casing being made of aluminum, not plastic, and the unit having some heft to it (making it feel more solid).

I don't know why this is an advantage, however, other than cosmetically. Aluminum cases are a tiny bit more mechanically stable than plastic, especially cheap plastics... but since I'm not hitting my flash drives with a hammer, it doesn't matter to me. Proper design would prevent flexion from being a problem too, if I accidentally left it in my back pocket and sat down or something.

I'm also guessing that manufacturing costs for aluminum are less, not sure about materials cost.

Anyone out there who could shed some insight into why aluminum is preferred over well-designed plastic?

17MB/sec != "blazing speed"

[kilgortrout]

I think it's really stretching things to refer to anything that writes at 17MB/sec as having "blazing speed". Sure it's faster than most thumb drives but that's like bragging about being the world's tallest midget.

This would be nice

[nkntr]

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))

"Fastest" I will grant them.

[GungaDan]

"Sleekest," though? It looks like every other usb flash drive. Maybe if they mounted a spoiler on it, or added some racing stripes. Or speed holes. Speed holes make everything sleeker.

Depends on what you use them for

[Sycraft-fu]

Mine is for systems maintenance. We are always dealing with broken systems of one variety or another at work and you can't gaurentee net access since often they are infected and thus why we are daeling with them. So my key has things like 2000 SP4, XP SP2, a virus scanner, patches, etc.

Well, espically for the service packs (I have one of these particular USB drives) the extra speed is really nice. Takes long enough as is. Also very nice for if I need to grab another program to install. Say they need Eclipse installed. Well I don't keep that on the drive, but I can put it on there, nearly as fast as an HD copy.

It's not critical or anything, but it's nice. The less waiting, the better.

Swallow?!

[DaedalusLogic]

What are you doing putting computer peripherals in your mouth? ...on second thought... I don't want to know.

This will be really useful...

[cybergibbons]

... the next time I bypass the alarm systems, break into someone's office, hack into their PC (which is running a previously unseen user interface which is some bastard child of XP and OS/2 Warp), and begin copying their hard drive to my uber-leet turbo thumb-drive.

Every time I have done this before, they have come back with about 30 seconds left to finish, leaving me with little option but to hide in the filing cabinet.

James Bond

(Has anyone else noticed that the time remaining in films is always accurate, and doesn't jump around like the real life ones?)

Basic questions

[spitzak]

Okay, I guess I'm not a big enough geek to directly recognize whether something is fast or slow. Need some basic questions answered:

1. What is the transfer rate of this thing?
2. What is the fastest that could be done based on the USB port design?
3. What is the transfer rate to a typical internal hard disk?
4. What is the transfer rate of a typical USB thumb drive?
5. What is the transfer rate of a typical large external USB drive?

Printing a few ratios would go a long way to knowing whether this really is a big deal.

Re:Basic questions

[BushCheney08]

1) reasonably fast
2) faster than this
3) very fast (compared to this)
4) slower than this
5) faster than this, but slower than 3. also, not quite the theoretical limit of 2.

Hope these answers help!

Re:Basic questions

[Surt]

1. 17MB/sec. http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/review.php?item= oczrally&file=1
2. 60 MB/sec. http://www.usb-2-0.com/what-is-usb-2-0.html#2.%20H ow%20fast%20is%20USB%202.0
3. 60 MB/sec. http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/HDS72 5050KLA360_2.html
4. 11 MB/sec. http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/usb_f lash_drives-09.html
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.

These things rock

[jambarama]

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.

Not as strange as you think..

[cliveholloway]

... when you consider this guy :)

YOU WON'T LOSE THE CAP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"real world speeds"

[j1mmy]

I like how his "real word" test involved copying cd images of commercial software. Just what does he use this thing for?

Lexar Lightning

[JLester]

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

AnandTech flash drive roundup

[fizzyl]

AnandTech has a more comprehensive review of many flash drives, and the OCZ is far from being the fastest.

Although it could be considered the cheapest fast drive in a way...

http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=254 9

Okay, dual channel is great, but...

[merreborn]

Why not take this further? If you can write data twice as fast by simultaneously writing to two internal flash chips, why not use 4? or 8? Hell, then you can even internally RAID 5 'em!

And don't even start with the "What, aren't flash drives fast enough already!?" line. My company was tasked with setting up a accounting firm to cheaply work from home, via USB thumb drives. Copying 3 meg spread across a few thousand small files took something on the order of 15 minutes. It's pretty hard to get people to synch nightly on their way out the door with times like that.

How reliable are these benchmarks?

[click2005]

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."

"Most Extreme"

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

"If you want the fastest, sleekest, and most extreme drive currently on the market, this is the one to get."

I'm sorry, but due to the terms of the Federal Hype Reduction Act of 2001, use of the phrase "extreme" in any technical product review is punishable by a mandatory 1 year sentence in a Federal DeHyping Educational Camp. Enjoy hours of knitting and watching PBS from within the soothing pastel confines of Club Fed, my friend...

Crow T. Trollbot

Oh shit...

[Graymalkin]

that's extreme!

For Comparison

[fredistheking]

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.