Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall superb drive with few specific quirks, April 8, 2008
I played around with this drive for almost a week now, and I am very much in love with it. However, like all relationships, this one is not perfect. Here's a quick breakdown:
Pros:
(+) 32gb for less than $200 (makes you wonder why the current 64GB usbs are at least 10x this price)
(+) HDTach benchmark 25 MB/s read 16MB/s write. Blazing speed!! (With large files only... more on that later)
(+) Very rugged encapsulation
(+) Lifetime warranty by manufacturer
(+) Cap holder for the frequent cap misplacer
Cons: (I'll be more specific here since this is probably more important)
(-) The physical size of the drive is larger than expected (take the picture with a grain of salt)
(-) I don't know if it's just the stick I got, but it has an unshapely bulge in the middle that makes me wonder if the drive is overstuffed, in which case it wouldn't be very shockproof, even with the tough enclosure.
(-) It took me a while to figure out where the drive physically indicates its capacity. It's not too clear, so if you want to show the drive off to your friends, you will have to do some explanation.
(-) With small files (<1 MB) transfers en masse, the drive seems to stutter A LOT in speed (e.g. first 10 files very fast, pause for a long time, then another 10 files really fast). No clue why this is happening, but I have tested 2000 picture transfers with this drive against another drive of comparable HDTach performance benchmark (I won't tell you which drive in case you think I'm advertising) - other drive: 14 minutes. The OCZ ATV: 77 minutes. However, for transferring a 4.7 gb DVD iso, the OCZ ATV pwned the other drive. Conclusion: for some reason this drive is just not good for transferring lots of small files.
That's my review. Overall my impression of this drive is extremely good, and I would definitely get a 64gb version if they make one. Four Stars.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
High Speed. But High Latency, April 26, 2008
The OCZ ATV 32GB is wonderful value for money, in my opinion. Having 32GB of storage wherever I go is just so useful. And I don't have to worry about a clunky and fragile 2.5" HDD!
But performance is a mixed-bag affair:
You see, this gadget has rather high average read/write speeds, and a typical (for USB flash disks I tested) read latency but it has the highest average write latency I saw. Here are the numbers (using H2BenchW on my nForce4-based motherboard, BTW):
Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 29596.2, min 28437.3, max 31534.2 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 24470.5, min 11758.5, max 26000.8 [KByte/s]
Random access read: average 1.38, min 0.51, max 3.01 [ms]
Random access write: average 362.35, min 2.07, max 486.68 [ms]
See the 362ms write access time? That's the slowest I ever saw on any storage device of any kind except floppies! Compare to SanDisk's Cruzer Titanium 2GB, for example:
Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 18475.3, min 18058.2, max 18754.7 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 15887.9, min 14112.3, max 16189.1 [KByte/s]
Random access read: average 1.11, min 0.78, max 2.47 [ms]
Random access write: average 34.61, min 4.84, max 43.89 [ms]
Or even Kingston's snail-ish DataTraveller Mini 2GB:
Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 11044.1, min 6264.6, max 11195.4 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 5404.5, min 3262.9, max 5694.6 [KByte/s]
Random access read: average 1.96, min -1.04, max 4.54 [ms]
Random access write: average 232.98, min 1.70, max 376.35 [ms]
The practical upshot of all of this is that the OCZ ATV 32GB performs very poorly when copying many small files *to* it.
This is a very easy to overcome limitation, of course, once you know it's there: simply zip the files before copying them over and all will be great.
To demonstrate, here's a test with a 4005 file, 1.64GiB folder:
Simple copy: 3037 seconds
Directly archived to OCZ with no compression: 2566 seconds
Archived to HDD first and then copied to OCZ, also with no compression: 524 seconds
That's a 627ms/file premium on direct-copy!
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Don't trust benchmarks, April 13, 2008
+ Pretty good storage space for the price when considering the advantages of a flash stick (drop/impact resistant, small, fits inside a thermos I keep inside a fire safe - the thermos for extra fire/heat/smoke/water protection)
+ The unit seems physically robust (tight rubber case, not a lot of mass to contribute to drop damage)
+/- Okay read speeds if you use it for that very often (installing software, listening to MP3s, or using ReadyBoost)
- Slow write speeds if you do a lot of data backups and/or real-world file copies to the unit
Benchmarks for this unit were vastly wrong in their write speed measurements... not sure why, maybe the manufacturers design these type of devices to trick them or maybe the benchmarks don't take flash's quirks into account.
For writing large files (a bunch of MP3s in a row copied with explorer) I'm seeing about 2.5MB/sec. For writing small files (a bunch of documents, etc. in a row copied with explorer) I'm seeing about 1MB/sec. Overall it's taking 3-5 hours to copy about 26GB of data to the drive.
This is actually close to the speed I was seeing with a generic (Super Flash Drive) 8GB flash stick I bought a couple years ago... though it was obviously smaller (though the 32GB is smaller physically).
Anyway, I'm not using this thing for every day primary storage, I'm using it for weekly incremental backups, so it's not often that I need to copy more than 100MB at a time, so the write speed is secondary to me (but I am disappointed that it was much slower than indicated by various people running benchmarks). In the other aspects (storage space, physical size, robustness) this unit meets my needs.
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