Home > Consumer Reviews > OCZ OCZUSBATV32G 32 GB ATV USB Flash Drive

I played around with this drive for almost a week now, and I am very much in love with it. However, like all relationships, this one is not perfect. Here's a quick breakdown:

Pros:

(+) 32gb for less than $200 (makes you wonder why the current 64GB usbs are at least 10x this price)
(+) HDTach benchmark 25 MB/s read 16MB/s write. Blazing speed!! (With large files only... more on that later)
(+) Very rugged encapsulation
(+) Lifetime warranty by manufacturer
(+) Cap holder for the frequent cap misplacer

Cons: (I'll be more specific here since this is probably more important)

(-) The physical size of the drive is larger than expected (take the picture with a grain of salt)
(-) I don't know if it's just the stick I got, but it has an unshapely bulge in the middle that makes me wonder if the drive is overstuffed, in which case it wouldn't be very shockproof, even with the tough enclosure.
(-) It took me a while to figure out where the drive physically indicates its capacity. It's not too clear, so if you want to show the drive off to your friends, you will have to do some explanation.
(-) With small files (<1 MB) transfers en masse, the drive seems to stutter A LOT in speed (e.g. first 10 files very fast, pause for a long time, then another 10 files really fast). No clue why this is happening, but I have tested 2000 picture transfers with this drive against another drive of comparable HDTach performance benchmark (I won't tell you which drive in case you think I'm advertising) - other drive: 14 minutes. The OCZ ATV: 77 minutes. However, for transferring a 4.7 gb DVD iso, the OCZ ATV pwned the other drive. Conclusion: for some reason this drive is just not good for transferring lots of small files.

That's my review. Overall my impression of this drive is extremely good, and I would definitely get a 64gb version if they make one. Four Stars.

The OCZ ATV 32GB is wonderful value for money, in my opinion. Having 32GB of storage wherever I go is just so useful. And I don't have to worry about a clunky and fragile 2.5" HDD!

But performance is a mixed-bag affair:

You see, this gadget has rather high average read/write speeds, and a typical (for USB flash disks I tested) read latency but it has the highest average write latency I saw. Here are the numbers (using H2BenchW on my nForce4-based motherboard, BTW):

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 29596.2, min 28437.3, max 31534.2 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 24470.5, min 11758.5, max 26000.8 [KByte/s]

Random access read: average 1.38, min 0.51, max 3.01 [ms]
Random access write: average 362.35, min 2.07, max 486.68 [ms]

See the 362ms write access time? That's the slowest I ever saw on any storage device of any kind except floppies! Compare to SanDisk's Cruzer Titanium 2GB, for example:

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 18475.3, min 18058.2, max 18754.7 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 15887.9, min 14112.3, max 16189.1 [KByte/s]

Random access read: average 1.11, min 0.78, max 2.47 [ms]
Random access write: average 34.61, min 4.84, max 43.89 [ms]

Or even Kingston's snail-ish DataTraveller Mini 2GB:

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 11044.1, min 6264.6, max 11195.4 [KByte/s]
Writing: average 5404.5, min 3262.9, max 5694.6 [KByte/s]

Random access read: average 1.96, min -1.04, max 4.54 [ms]
Random access write: average 232.98, min 1.70, max 376.35 [ms]

The practical upshot of all of this is that the OCZ ATV 32GB performs very poorly when copying many small files *to* it.

This is a very easy to overcome limitation, of course, once you know it's there: simply zip the files before copying them over and all will be great.

To demonstrate, here's a test with a 4005 file, 1.64GiB folder:

Simple copy: 3037 seconds
Directly archived to OCZ with no compression: 2566 seconds
Archived to HDD first and then copied to OCZ, also with no compression: 524 seconds

That's a 627ms/file premium on direct-copy!

+ Pretty good storage space for the price when considering the advantages of a flash stick (drop/impact resistant, small, fits inside a thermos I keep inside a fire safe - the thermos for extra fire/heat/smoke/water protection)
+ The unit seems physically robust (tight rubber case, not a lot of mass to contribute to drop damage)

+/- Okay read speeds if you use it for that very often (installing software, listening to MP3s, or using ReadyBoost)

- Slow write speeds if you do a lot of data backups and/or real-world file copies to the unit

Benchmarks for this unit were vastly wrong in their write speed measurements... not sure why, maybe the manufacturers design these type of devices to trick them or maybe the benchmarks don't take flash's quirks into account.

For writing large files (a bunch of MP3s in a row copied with explorer) I'm seeing about 2.5MB/sec. For writing small files (a bunch of documents, etc. in a row copied with explorer) I'm seeing about 1MB/sec. Overall it's taking 3-5 hours to copy about 26GB of data to the drive.

This is actually close to the speed I was seeing with a generic (Super Flash Drive) 8GB flash stick I bought a couple years ago... though it was obviously smaller (though the 32GB is smaller physically).

Anyway, I'm not using this thing for every day primary storage, I'm using it for weekly incremental backups, so it's not often that I need to copy more than 100MB at a time, so the write speed is secondary to me (but I am disappointed that it was much slower than indicated by various people running benchmarks). In the other aspects (storage space, physical size, robustness) this unit meets my needs.

I am a professional software engineer and own 12 other USB Flash memory sticks ranging in size from 1 to 8 gigs. I bought this drive a little under 3 months ago due to a combination of it's rugged design, large capacity, cheap price and generally good reviews.

The drive seemed to work OK most of the time despite having slightly slower than average read and write speeds, but I found that about once in every 5 times that I ejected this drive from my machine, it would not be recognized as a valid USB Device the next time I plugged it into another machine. I would have to remove the drive from the machine and put it back in once or twice for it to be recognized as a USB hard drive rather than a problematic Unknown device. I also found that this device was harder to eject than other drives, even though I did not have any files/folders open on the drive.... sometimes it would just not eject. The drive completely died yesterday on me and I lost all my data. The drive cannot be reformatted, scanned for errors, or cloned with Symantec Ghost, and it shows up as a 0 MB in size and is recongized by my machine as "SM324BC MEMORY BAR" instead of the original "OCZ 32 Gig" name that it used to show up as. The vendor sent me a tool that they use to reflash the drives back to a factory default, but that would not work either as the drive is completely dead and will not respond at all to reads or writes by the tool. The manufacturer was good about attempting to honor their Lifetime warranty and offfering to RMA the device for me, but unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the contents of the drive, I cannot send it back and need to eat the cost and go buy a different drive... obviously from a different vendor.

I did a little research and searching on various forums and found a few other people that had the same problem happen to them. I definitely cannot recommend this product to anyone else based on the lack of reliability that I encountered while using this product in the short time that I had a chance to use it before it failed.

As a computer science professor I carry a huge number of resources around with me from class to class. The quality of portable storage is very important to me, and I have used 20+ different devices for this over the past many years. Based on my experience, I strongly encourage others to stay away from this device.

Immediately before using this device, I used the Corsair 16 GB Flash Survivor for over a year as my primary portable device. Although its shape was a bit odd, the overall "package" and performance of the device was strong. When I moved to this 32 GB drive I was shocked at how much slower the performance was. It is not unusual for a simple process like saving a Word document to the disk to take 20 seconds. Transferring larger files is even more painfully slow. Both read and write operations perform equally poor. Forget about trying to run an application from the device. There is no comparison at all between the speed of my old 16 GB drive from this company and this newer device.

Secondly, if you are planning to redeem a rebate from OCZ related to this purchase: beware. You may never see your rebate. Go to their company web site, visit the forums, and prepare to be amazed. I bought my device in early August 2008 and promptly mailed the rebate form. As of mid-October, I have received no communication other than an email over a month ago saying that my submission was received for processing. When I attempt to track the rebate in the online system, I am told that the rebate was rejected (no reasons stated) and I will receive a letter saying why by the end of November. OCZ outsources their rebate processing and apparently (based on the multitude of reports) cares very little about how this is actually handled.