OCZ Rally 2GB Flash Drive
Examination:
Unlike the Corsair Flash Voyager, which was quite innovative with its physical design and rubber construction to allow for a waterproof protection, as we had displayed in our testing from a previous review, the OCZ Rally aims for an ultra sleek and pocket-sized device. As can be seen from the picture below, the Rally is a bit smaller than Corsair's flash drive offering and we also have our traditional golf ball size comparison.
As far as the external appearance goes, its design is similar to Transcend's JetFlash 110 with the exception of an extendable USB connector. On the actual unit, one side is OCZ's logo with web address while the Rally emblem covers the opposing area. The lettering in these areas is white on the black-colored metal surface. At the rear of the device is a blue-colored LED for indicating data read/write activity. Also accompanying this end is a small loop for use with the included neck-strap/lanyard.
One of the features that currently make this product unique is OCZ's implementation of dual channel technology for accelerating the read and write speeds for the unit. Theoretically, this allows data to be read/written from two flash memory chips simultaneously. After we had finished our vigorous flash memory benchmarking, which are displayed later on in this article, we went a step further and dissected the entire OCZ Rally unit. Disassembling the unit is obviously not recommended as doing so improperly can result in failure and voiding the manufacturer warranty. Inside the OCZ casing, we did indeed find dual flash memory chips that were manufactured by Samsung. The Samsung chips used were labeled K9W8G08U1M with a batch number of 528 and 516. The random read time for a 2KB page read operation, as stated by Samsung, is 25µs (maximum) while the serial access at a minimum is 30ns. For the fast write cycle times, 200µs is the typical program time while the block erase is rated for 2ms. Also on the flash drive's PCB is a UT161-T6 PBA079 0531CA chip, which is manufactured by the Taiwanese-based USBest Technology.