OCZ OCZUSBATV32G 32 GB ATV USB Flash Drive
by OCZ Technology
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of OCZ OCZUSBATV32G 32 GB ATV USB Flash Drive
Customer Review: High Speed. But High Latency
Summary: 5 Stars
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!
Customer Review: Very Poor Reliability
Summary: 2 Stars
I am a professional software engineer and own 12 other USB Flash memory sticks ranging in size from 1 to 8 gigs. I bought this drive a little under 3 months ago due to a combination of it's rugged design, large capacity, cheap price and generally good reviews.
The drive seemed to work OK most of the time despite having slightly slower than average read and write speeds, but I found that about once in every 5 times that I ejected this drive from my machine, it would not be recognized as a valid USB Device the next time I plugged it into another machine. I would have to remove the drive from the machine and put it back in once or twice for it to be recognized as a USB hard drive rather than a problematic Unknown device. I also found that this device was harder to eject than other drives, even though I did not have any files/folders open on the drive.... sometimes it would just not eject. The drive completely died yesterday on me and I lost all my data. The drive cannot be reformatted, scanned for errors, or cloned with Symantec Ghost, and it shows up as a 0 MB in size and is recongized by my machine as "SM324BC MEMORY BAR" instead of the original "OCZ 32 Gig" name that it used to show up as. The vendor sent me a tool that they use to reflash the drives back to a factory default, but that would not work either as the drive is completely dead and will not respond at all to reads or writes by the tool. The manufacturer was good about attempting to honor their Lifetime warranty and offfering to RMA the device for me, but unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the contents of the drive, I cannot send it back and need to eat the cost and go buy a different drive... obviously from a different vendor.
I did a little research and searching on various forums and found a few other people that had the same problem happen to them. I definitely cannot recommend this product to anyone else based on the lack of reliability that I encountered while using this product in the short time that I had a chance to use it before it failed.
Customer Review: Worked for Awhile
Summary: 2 Stars
I used to think these flash drives were super reliable because they had no moving parts and were just memory. And though that's true to an extent, I've had more trouble with OCZ brand sticks that any other; primarily when they just stop working.
One data recovery company states: "These are some real problems experienced by OCZ Rally2 USB 2 and USB flash devices in general. Flash memory devices are very vulnerable to all sorts of environmental influence. For example, without a cap your drive could be vulnerable to static discharge. Water, humidity, dust, extreme temperatures could also be fatal. Usual symptoms of failing drives are: USB flash disk drive does not work as expected, it is no longer seen connected under Windows XP/Vista, Mac or BIOS, it doesn't show up in Device manager and Found new hardware wizard doesn't pop up or it can't find standard USB mass storage device driver. Also after inserting faulty USB stick you could get 'Usb device not recognized' message in Windows."
Another recovery group states: "USB thumb drives can abruptly stop working for no reason. Bad workmanship many times is the cause."
And of course, despite the outrageous price on these things, OCZ doesn't even cover the cost of return. They should at least send you a 1 GB flash drive for having to send these things back.
Another downside of these drives is that they are slooooooow. If you use them, format them as FAT32 drives. That way, if they're disconnected quickly, you won't lose data. Interestingly, this particular product is protected against static and outside bumps and even surviving laundry. Sadly, after visiting OCZ's website, this model seems to have a problem. The good news is they'll fix the problem, but don't rely on this to keep files you don't have anywhere else. After have a couple of these fail on me, I'm now using a small hard drive has 500GBs and costs about the same amount. You can't bounce it, but it should be more reliable...at least I'm hoping.
Customer Review: Fast, but NOT for Mac OSX... sometimes
Summary: 3 Stars
I have a Corsair 8GB GT Flash Voyager USB Flash Drive, that I love, but it's starting to be too small for the work I do.
When I saw the reviews of the 16GB GT, I was sad they are using different chips inside. Slower chips.
SO...
I did all the research, and decided to buy the "True Plug and Play (Compatible with MAC OS X)" OCZ product.
It is very nice on my PC (This is why it gets 3 STARS), but I bought it for both the PC and the Mac.
Here is the latest from the OCZ support:
"Comment: hi - i think you can get drivers for your mac on the mac website i am not sure if we have drivers on our website. "
I searched all over the place. There are no drivers... anywhere.
Besides... having to download drivers is hardly "True Plug and Play".
If anyone got this to work on a Mac, please comment, and let me know how.
ADDED:
I figured it out.
After seeing his problem in several forums, I just decided to reformat it, using my PC to FAT32.
It now works in my Mac.
Fat32 can be used on both PC and Mac, but if I format it using Mac Extended formatting, it would allow it to hold files larger then 4GB, but not be usable on a PC. As it is, I have a 32GB flash drive that can NOT hold a 4GB file, but can hold 28 1GB files. :(
----- added July 2010 ---
I've had this drive for almost a year now, and I still like a lot. I dropped the 'love' to 'like' because in the past month it started to have connection issues. I use this drive Every day, and I mean Every Single day, multiple times (like 30+) per day. I used to just leave it plugged in, to increase my MacBook Pro's Disk-space. It's that fast.
But lately it just self disconnects and I get the error "Device removed improperly..." after about 10 minutes of use.
I never lost ANY data on this.
It went through the wash.
It gets thrown from a 4th floor window regularly to the street below.
When they make a 64GB, I'll upgrade.
Customer Review: Overall superb drive with few specific quirks
Summary: 4 Stars
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.