The advances in technology still amaze me, and one of the biggest advances is the flash drive. Sure, now they seem like a common item where they are even just given away as promo items, or even a type of business card, but not so long ago they were considered a luxury item and a 64MB flash drive was something coveted. It seems like everyone has one or at least knows what they are, and pretty much any company that is involved in the memory industry has a line of flash drives out now. One thing about a product becoming a common item is the fact that these companies need to work much harder to get you to buy their product over another, of course price is a big factor but also durability, some companies are marketing more towards the ‘urban explorer’ with flash drives that are water-proof, highly durable but yet fast with a large capacity. The name OCZ is synonymous with fast, high-performance, high quality memory and their line of flash drives are some of the best on the market. So, for review today, I have their latest entry into the flash drive arena, called the ATV Turbo Flash Drive, knowing it’s from OCZ we can expect great things, but these drives are also highly durable with a rubber housing which is 100% weatherproof, and it looks cool too… So read on to check it out as I put the OCZ Turbo to the test against two of the fastest flash drives out there using both Windows XP and Vista Ultimate in synthetic and real world benchmarks.. as a side note, this review marks number 300 for DragonSteelMods -Woo-Hoo!
Review: OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB USB Flash Drive
Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio
Sponsor: OCZ Technology
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive
Description:
The ATV Turbo takes speed to a whole new level for performance enthusiasts and boasts the fastest speeds on the market. Not only are these premium flash drives aggressively fast at transferring files of all types and sizes, but are optimized for Windows Vista Ready Boost, offering true performance advantages to this latest operating system.
ATV Turbo flash drives feature durable and colorful rubber tread housing, which is a 100% weatherproof storage solution to keep digital files safe in any conditions, even fully submerged in water. The attached cap holder will help prevent misplacement of the protective key cover, while the chain can easily fasten to your key ring for ultimate portability.
Specs:
-High Speed USB 2.0 Certified
-Read: 33-35MB / second
-Write: 26-30MB / second
-True Plug and Play (Compatible with MAC OS X)
-Dual Channel Technology
-Available in 4GB capacities
-Waterproof Rubber Housing
-Orange LED Status Light
-Lifetime Warranty
Part Number:
ATV Turbo 4GB – OCZUSBATVT4G
A Better Look at Things
:
The OCZ ATV Turbo flash drive comes packaged in my favorite (/sarcasm) impenetrable plastic clamshell type packaging which needs to be cut open with a very good pair of scissors or very sharp knife… Other than the pain in opening the package it really is attractively done with the ATV Turbo displayed in plain sight on the front with some specs and features listed, while the back has a more detailed description for potential buyers to read.
After finally getting open the clamshell, something which I couldn’t wait to do, we find the OCZ ATV Turbo Flash Drive and that’s it. Some may not like the coloring but I happen to like it very much, it has that construction/tough look to it like it will be able to withstand anything you throw at it.
The front has the ATV Turbo logo prominently displayed in the middle, with a small LED to the side that lights up yellow/orange for activity. Included is a cap protector of sorts attached to a keychain, the keychain used here would not have been my first choice, these seem to break fairly easily, for me anyway…
The back of the drive just has the OCZ website address on it, not much to look at really..
The cap and the cap holder both have the OCZ logo on them in white which makes them stand out a bit from the black and yellow, very nice touch with the coloring scheme. The cap when not in use gets slipped onto the rubber cap protector so you don’t lose it, nice idea, but personally I would have rather had the cap attached to the body of the drive itself…
The OCZ ATV Turbo is nicely made, and lightweight, yet it feels like it can withstand most anything you can throw at it or even on it. I like the look and feel of the ATV Turbo, especially the sides, they are like a tire tread and offer a firm handhold on the drive at all times. I believe your data will be well protected while it’s stored inside the ATV Turbo flash drive, one less thing to worry about in our hectic lives…
Installation, Testing and Comparison
The OCZ ATV Turbo flash drive has an yellow/orange LED in it that lights up for solid when powered on and blinks when transferring data.
For testing I like to use synthetic and real world benchmarks or tests. For the synthetic tests I used HD Tach RW (with write test enabled) from SimpliSoftware and SiSoft Sandra XI Removable Storage Benchmark. To test how it works in a real world setting I use DiskBench from Nodesoft, which gives us actual times in milliseconds and is something I think that is more understandable by most people.
I put the OCZ ATF Turbo 4GB Flash Drive up against my Super Talent 4GB, and ATP Toughdrive 1GB flash drives. These are the fastest drives I own, and the Super Talent is one of the fastest on the market today.
As I mentioned in the intro I tested these drives under Windows XP and Windows Vista Ultimate to see the performance of them comparably. The same system is used, just a different OS, I have XP and Vista installed on separate hard drives presently.
(Also note, my XP installation is on a standard SATA hard drive, while my Vista installation is on an SATA II hard drive, so the performance numbers might vary a bit)
Below you’ll see two graphs for each set of tests, XP and Vista, so let’s get started.
First up is SiSoft Sandra Removable Storage Benchmark:
Combined Device Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the Combined Index figures over the four file sizes. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance)
Endurance Factor: is a figure representing the Wear and Life Expectancy of flash devices; this is obtained by dividing the average performance (normal condition, i.e. sequential write) to the lowest performance (high-stress condition, i.e. same block re-write).
It measures the relative improvement of endurance caused by the wear levelling or flash management algorithm; the absolute endurance of a device (i.e. its expected life-time) is directly dependent, in addition to this Endurance Factor, on the nominal manufacturer rating of maximum erase/reprogram cycles, which is typically 100,000+ for SLC and 10,000+ for MLC devices. (Higher is better, i.e. longer life-time for the device)
As we can see from this set of tests in XP the OCZ ATV Turbo is clearly the winner for the Combined Index scoring, but when run on Vista the Super Talent flash drive closes the gap quite a bit and comes very close to the OCZ Score. You can also see the scores are much higher when running under Windows Vista.
Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued:
The next test would be DiskBench from Nodesoft, and I think it is an awesome utility to really understand and test your storage devices. Synthetic benches are nice, but kind of hard to understand really, DiskBench puts things in a time perspective so you can really compare performance. In the following graphs I used the tests for Copy To, Copy From and Read. These are just what they sound like, tests to copy a file to a device, copy a file from a device and read a file on a device, I feel these are things that people will be doing most with their USB drives, and therefore will want to know this information more than some synthetic benchmark that they really don’t know what it means… I used a 385MB .AVI video file for all of the tests shown here. Obviously the lower the scores or times is better.
Running under XP there really isn’t much of a noticeable difference unless you’re really concerned with those tenths of seconds, in the real world I doubt you’d notice the difference at all.
Running under Vista though we see something a bit more drastic though with seconds between the ATV Turbo and the Super Talent flash drives in the Copy to and Copy from tests, still though it’s only a couple seconds. Of course if we look at the time to Copy to for the ATP drive we can see a huge time difference in the Copy to tests for both XP and Vista.
Finally we have HD Tach RW from SimpliSoftware. This set of tests shows us the results for Burst Speed, Random Access, Average Write, Average Read and CPU Usage percentage. Please note that the write test would not run under Windows Vista so there are no results shown for that test in the Vista results graph.
Lower scores are better for CPU % and Random Access /ms .
Higher Scores are better for Read, Write and Burst tests / results shown in MB/s.
The OCZ and Super Talent flash drives are pretty evenly matched running under Windows XP, but the OCZ ATV Turbo has a 4% CPU usage score while the Super Talent is only using 2%. We see pretty much the same under Vista with the exception of the Super Talent having a 7% CPU usage score, I don’t know what’s up with that, and the ATP is running a whopping 10% CPU usage.
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I think that by looking at these results the Super Talent and OCZ ATV Turbo flash drives are pretty evenly matched in the performance area, now which one to get would be more of a personal choice, and my choice would be the ATV Turbo as it offers the protection the Super Talent does not.
As for Ready Boost in Vista, well I’ve been using Vista for about six months now and I can’t really feel any difference between using a Ready Boost drive and not using one, and it doesn’t matter which brand or type of drive being used… I can say that I have a spare 1gig drive hanging around that I was using for Ready Boost, just because I could, and replacing that with a 4gig drive did seem to make the system a bit quicker to respond, but I’m not sure if I was imagining it or not…
Summary:
Flash drives are one of the most useful devices out there today and with our active lifestyles the OCZ ATV Turbo is a perfect fit for those of us that take our data with us no matter where we go.
The OCZ ATV Turbo offers not only high speed data transfers but a rugged outer casing that is sure to withstand the rigors of anyones daily life and activities.
I know I’ve got a new personal favorite flash drive in the ATV Turbo!
DragonSteelMods gives the OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB USB Flash Drive a 4.5 out of 5 score and my Editor’s Choice Award as well.
Pros:
-Tough and rugged
-Weatherproof
-Looks cool
-Fast
-Large capacity
Cons:
-Keychain a bit on the cheap side
I would like to thank OCZ for the chance to review the ATV Turbo 4GB USB Flash Drive and for their continued support of DSM.
review# 300 (woo-hoo!)
(This is SPARTA!)
(hehe -couldn’t resist…)