OCZ ATV 16GB

Full Review

As the mainstream series, this drive (model number OCZUSBATV16G) from OCZ turns in quite a good performance. The rubberized casing as a body (thus shock/water-proof), the stylized blue markings over a black background, and the build quality leave no doubt about the attention to detail of the ATV’s design. Even better, it has this cap holder on a chain, which besides looking unique, manages to get rid of a long-standing woe of users. This way, the drive doesn’t need to deal with the “usability degrade” of a retractable USB connector, nor the issue of a misplaced cap (you have the cap right there on the chained holder, remember?). This drive gave a read speed average of 31.1 MBps, read access time average of 0.8 milli-seconds, and utilized about 7 per cent of the CPU during tests. On our test bench, real-world read speed tests also showed the same speed as observed in the benchmarks, for large and small files, when files were copied from the flash drive to a fast hard disk drive. Thus, synthetic benchmarks were consistent with real-world speeds in read tests. Keep in mind that for read speeds atleast, the limitation now seems to be the USB interface chip, and that most current flash drives can “read” as fast as your USB 2.0 port allows. Write speeds can be better judged through real-world tests. To test performance in real world usage, we transferred files to the flash drive from a fast desktop hard disk. Writing large files (over 1 GB in size) to the flash drive results in a speed of 11.39 MBps. The speed of writing multiple small files (1.46 GB, 124 files of varying sizes) declines to 10.24 MBps (as expected). Non-file performance is usually higher when benchmarked, but they do not portray the picture that a user experiences during daily usage in the real-world. The ATV (as are all the others in the Top 5) is fast enough to support Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost (which helps speedup your PC if you don’t have enough RAM). However for most enthusiasts, ReadyBoost is not the best way to use a pendrive, and purchasing more RAM would give a much better boost on a price-performance basis. This drive performed very well in most of our tests, but no software was bundled with it. It couldn’t get the top spot only because the SanDisk UltraBackup drive offered more functionality. OCZ offers a lifetime warranty on this drive.

Bottom Line

Styled for the enthusiast, this drive has a rubberized body to protect from water and shocks. The cap holder on a chain is a nice touch. Performed great in some real-world tests, but there is no software bundled together.