OCZ Rally2 Turbo review
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 06 Feb 2008

The first OCZ memory stick I came across was the Rally 512 MB. Its compact design was a welcome change when compared to some other, bulky pieces. The Rally could be plugged into any USB port, because its dimensions were marginally larger than the USB connector itself. Next came the Rally2, a slightly larger version, with improved performance and capacity. Today we are taking a look at the Rally2 Turbo, an improved version which is supposed to bring even higher speeds, especially when you are writing data to your stick.

The Rally2 Turbo flash drive is identical to the Rally2 drive, except for the turbo label. Aside from the flash drive itself, the package contains only a grey band to attach the drive to it, and an extension cord for the USB. Due to the small size, you will probably not need the cord altogether, since it can fit into a USB port even if the adjacent ports are occupied with cables or other devices.

If you're interested in the design itself, check out this picture:

Performance
Aside from the 4GB version we are reviewing today, you can also get the Rally2 Turbo 8GB, which is less than what Rally2 can do. The capacity of the basic Rally2 can go up to 32 GB. It seems that the faster chips put into the Turbo are not yet available in such large capacities.

HD Tach:
HD Tach measures the performance of HDDs or flash media. The OCZ Rally2 Turbo scored 31.2 average speed and 27.8 burst speed with a .7 access time. That is significantly faster than the old Rally2, which bursted around the same, but had an average speed of just 21.5 MB/s. Corsair Voyager GT did 27.1 average and 24.1 burst with .8 seek time.

ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO enables us to see how the drive handles various file sizes, which always has an impact on the transfer speeds achievable. We benchmarked two file sizes, 16 KB and 1024 KB. The Turbo did just what OCZ claimed it would. With file sizes larger than 1024 KB it did 31068 KB/s write and 34956 KB/s read, which is just about identical to the 35 MB/s claimed by OCZ. With smaller files, the write performance drops significantly, to only 9315 KB/s and read drops to 21223 KB/s. In today?s world such sizes are not very common, so this should be viewed as the worst case scenario.

The old Rally only did around 13000 KB/s write, so the Turbo is at least twice as fast, which is an astonishing result. Another similar product is the Corsair Voyager GT, which is bulkier, but has rubber protection. It did 31223 KB/s read and 28432 KB/s write, which makes the Rally2 Turbo a very attractive product.