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Introduction

When a company asks to send us their latest USB key offerings with a promise of "ultra high performance", we are understandably a little wary of accepting. Most companies inflate their products rating to the point of disbelief and when actually tested, they almost always fall short. This is a common trend in the hardware industry but speed with usb keys is slightly more subjective because most people don't keep tabs on performance numbers the same way they might on their $500 video card.

OCZ is a new contender in the crowded flash drive market, though they are renowned for their dektop memory offerings. They have had a track record of offering extremely solid memory for a decent price and are favoured by many overclockers for the high clock speeds offered on some of their RAM.

Their latest product offering is suprisingly then not new RAM, but instead a seemingly simple USB drive. What this drive touts as its differentiating feature from the competition is its speed. With a claimed read speed of 28 MB's per second, the OCZ rally drive aims to trump every other flash drive currently on the market. Its 14 MB's per second write speed is commendable as well, though not as suprising as the Rally's high read speed.

OCZ have stated that current USB key offerings are slow due to their single channel nature, so they've designed the Rally drive with a dual channel memory configuration. Whether single channel flash memory causes a bottleneck or not is debatable, the added 'sweet' factor of dual channel memory in a thumb drive though, is not.

Transcend have been offering for a while a 2 GB version of their Jetflash 110 that purports to have dual channel memory, and though we didn't have one for testing, its 18 MB per second (however modest) claimed read time is not at the same level as the Rally's. The OCZ drive is also available in sizes right down to 512 MB that still retain the dual channel configuration of the larger models.