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Putting The Flash In Flash Drive
{mosgoogle}Every laptop gamers needs a USB flash drive. And there is no faster USB flash drive than the OCZ Technology Rally. If you're looking for the fastest flash drive money can buy, the OCZ Rally is it. How does the Rally get it amazing speed? With Dual Channel technology. OCZ Technology is among the first memory makers to use dual channel in a flash drive. The result is a flash drive that leaves the competition sucking dusk.
The Rally USB 2.0 flash drive is made for the speed freaks and speed is what they'll get. You won't find any fancy security software or U3 compatibility here. Hell, there's not even a driver CD in the packaging. What the package does contain however, is a sleek black Rally flash drive, a USB extension cable, a lanyard to loop the Rally around your neck and a key ring to hook the Rally with your car keys.
The OCZ Rally USB 2.0 flash drive is available in 512MB, 1GB (our review unit) and 2GB capacities. Unlike other flash drives we've reviewed, the Rally is housed in a very durable aluminum chassis instead of cheap plastic. This gives the drive a very high quality weighted feel. OCZ Technology backs up that quality with a lifetime warranty on the flash drive.
Where To Buy It
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Taking a Closer Look
{mosgoogle}The OCZ Rally is one of the thinnest flash drive we have ever seen. It also has very good feel thanks its aluminum chassis. While many flash drive comes with a detachable neck lanyard, the Rally also comes with a key ring. A very nice touch indeed. There is also a USB extension cable for those older computers that have their USB ports at the back. When plugged into a USB port, the rear of the Rally lights up in blue and will blink when there is activity.
Using the OCZ Rally is just like any other flash drive. No software is required if you're running Windows XP - just plug it into any free USB 2.0 port and you're good to go. Windows will recognize the drive as a removable storage device. You'll be able to read and write to it like you would any other drive. Because the Rally comes with no drivers software, it will not work on some older versions of Windows. The Rally will work if your computer doesn't have USB 2.0 but its speed will be drastically slower when plugged into a USB 1.1 port.
Out of the package, the Rally feels extremely nice. It's aluminum casing and matte black finish gives the drive a much more professional look than competing flash drives. The thinness of the Rally allows you to plug it into a crowded USB hub without having to unplug the device on the next port. The USB output is protected by a cap but when its removed there is no place to store it. By comparison, some flash drives, like the Kingston U3 DataTraveler, allows the cap to be plugged into the end of the drive. This may seem like a minor point, until you lose the cap.
Where To Buy It
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Testing & Performance
{mosgoogle}As a flash drive, this thing is very fast! Using HD Tach 3, we measured 20.5 MB/sec read speed and a blazing fast 16.9 MB/sec write speed. To put this performance into perspective, the Rally's write speed is faster than the read speed of many competing USB drives.
On our real world read and write test, the Rally once again shows the power of dual channel. We were able to write the 266 Meg Windows XP SP2 update from hard drive to flash drive in just 16.4 seconds. This blows away the 1 minute and 10 second it took to do the task on a generic flash drive. On the read test, we were able to transfer the SP2 from flash drive back to hard drive in just 14.3 seconds, nearly twice as fast as the generic drive. If speed is what you're into, then the Rally is your USB drive.
Unfortunately, speed is pretty much all the OCZ Rally has going for it. For many this will be enough. The Rally is so fast you can even run games right off the drive. We had no problem installing and running Quake 3 from the Rally, and noticed no slowdown between Rally and hard drive. What OCZ Technology needs to do now is create a U3 version of the Rally. Then it would be near perfect.
Current Real Time Pricing
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