OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 3 of 4 Published by

teaser

Page 3

Alright, let's do some testing. First things first, let's grab that glass of water, and submerge the flash-disk for 5 minutes.

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick review

Ehm, yeah I wasn't kidding there. If it states on the package that its water-proof then we'll test it. I do hope that a manufacturer will write "attract gorgeous blonde women" on it's packaging though.

Anyway, after 5 minutes we took the flash disk out of the hot tub and suffice to say that the water wasn't a problem. I wouldn't recommend doing this on a regular basis though okay ? In fact, I don't recommend it at all.

Let's plug it into a USB port and see if it still works:

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick review

There we go, plug and play bro. A fully working 4 GB flash-disk reporting for duty. It installs itself fine, and Windows Vista will run a quick test on read/write speeds. It was accepted as ReadyBoost cache memory.

What is ReadyBoost ? Vista's SuperFetch function will retrieve prefetched data from the virtual memory page file and move it to physical memory as soon as possible to ensure the continuity of the performance enhancement. In spite of this, because the page file exists on the hard disk (which is less responsive than physical memory) SuperFetch is still going to be hindered by the time that it takes the hard disk to respond to its retrieval operation. Microsoft figured to beat this probable performance degradation in SuperFetch's retrieval operation, the ReadyBoost feature will monitor prefetched data that that is to be sent to virtual memory and instead direct it to a more responsive memory device, this can be a USB drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other flash memory device that is connected to your computer. In this case, the ATV Turbo.

Readyboost is still not quite understood by many. The known requirements are as follows: You will need at least a 64MB Hi-Speed USB flash drive (which goes without saying) that exceeds 3.5MB/s for 4KB random reads and 2.5MB/s for 512KB random writes uniformly across the device. What Micrrosoft won't tell you, is that you need under 1 ms response delay. Right, let's check out the actual read and write speeds.

We used a 2 GB compressed data file which we'll copy back and forth with the help of a blazing fast WD Raptor HD.

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick review

Now as you can see, the copy speeds are really quite nice. Advertised is 33/35 MB/sec. We're pretty darn close, so that's top notch.

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick review

The achilles heel of flash memory however is that it's downright slow in it's writing procedure. Advertised is 26-30MB/sec and as you can see, we're not even close. We tried this on two different test system. The results were virtually the same.

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB memory stick review

A quick run with synthetic software based Sandra shows very similar results. Roughly 30-31 MB read speeds, and 16-17 MB/sec write speeds. Although slightly faster than our results that's still not as advertised. This is a two MB test btw, which can explain the slightly faster write speeds.

ATTO Disk BenchmarkThe third test we used to bench the performance of flash drives is ATTO. We configured this program to transfer 32MB of data to the flash drive in blocks from 1KB to 1MB.  

atto1.jpg

Here's where the product starts to shine, we transfer block sizes bigger than 64KB you'll reach 24.000 KB/sec write speeds. The reality though is what you are looking at in our first test, the RAW data copy.

When you transfer files bigger than 64KB to the drive you can expect read speeds of more than 30MB/s and write speeds of over 30 MB/s. According to OCZ this is only possible only possible on motherboards with the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI chipset (which we used).

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print