OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB

Examination:

The OCZ Rally 2 Turbo is housed inside a black aluminum housing, which is similar to the original Rally. The Rally 2 Turbo logo is printed on one side while the OCZ company logo and URL consume the other side. The drive's capacity is printed near the (orange) status indicator LED. The cap on this flash drive easily slides off, but unfortunately, there is no place to store the cap while the drive is in use. With the ATV Turbo, OCZ had a cap holder but this isn't to be found on the Rally 2 series. The Rally 2 Turbo is a bit smaller than the ATV Turbo.

Performance:

The OCZ Rally 2 Turbo was tested with a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, which contained an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 "Penryn" processor, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 128MB GPU, 120GB 5400RPM SATA HDD, and 2GB of DDR2-667 system memory. On the software side was Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Beta with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel.

As long as you are running a Linux 2.4 or Linux 2.6 kernel you should have no problems with using the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo. For some quick benchmarks we had used the Linux hdparm utility for measuring the how fast the Rally 2 can sustain sequential data reads under Linux. Hdparm is able to test this without any file-system overhead. In our tests with Ubuntu 8.04 on the ThinkPad T61 we had an average read of 31.29MB/s. OCZ Technology has designed the OCZUSBR2TDC-4GB to sustain 35MB/s reads, but we were just shy of that. In comparison, the Corsair Flash Survivor GT and Flash Voyager GT had read on the T61 at roughly 29MB/s. While the OCZ Rally 2GB is no longer with us as we had busted open the drive in its review, that original dual-channel flash drive had performed at about 26MB/s with the original Flash Voyager coming in at under 20MB/s.

Conclusion:

In OCZ's quest to deliver 110% customer satisfaction, they have once again delivered another excellent product offering. While there is no reason to throw out your Rally or Rally 2 if you currently own one, if you are looking at purchasing a new flash drive the Rally 2 Turbo is currently OCZ's fastest USB 2.0 flash drive. In addition to its performance, the Rally 2 Turbo is encased inside aluminum housing and is accompanied by a lifetime product warranty. If you are after ultimate durability, however, the OCZ ATV Turbo or Corsair Flash Survivor GT is still the more durable bet. The OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB can currently be found for about $60 USD.