OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB Flash Drive Review

Performance Testing

Testing flash drives is not as simple as putting together a bunch of files, dragging them into the Flash Drive folder in Windows and using a stopwatch to time how long the transfer takes. Rather, there are factors such as read / write speed and data burst speed to take into account.

For these tests I used a combination of the ATTI Disk Benchmark, HDTach and the SIS Sandra Removable Storage benchmark. I plugged the ATV and its into the same USB 2.0 port directly on the back plate of the DFI Lanparty SLI DR Expert motherboard.


Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed that you are likely to experience with this drive.



In our last tests, the Corsair Voyager GT reigned supreme and now the OCZ ATV Turbo has displaced it from the top spot by narrowly edging it out in this benchmark. It looks like OCZ’s claims of speed are well founded with this drive.


Random Access Time

Once again, HDTach was used for the benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive.



While the ATV’s performance was good, it could not match the numbers we saw with its small sibling: the OCZ Rally 2. This may be due to the fact that the ATV is double the size of any other drive we have reviewed in the past and thus the seek times may be increased.


ATTO Disk Benchmark

The Atto disk benchmark tests the drives’ read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was kept at its default values and each test was run 4 times. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.


It looks once like once again OCZ’s new 4GB drive is hanging tough against one of the faster drives we have tested in the past. It actually handily beat out the Corsair across the board in the write category while finishing only slightly behind in the read tests.


Sandra Removable Storage Benchmark

This test was run with the removable storage benchmark in Sandra IX Standard. All of the scores are calculated in operations per second and have been averaged out from the scores of 4 test runs.



The ATV comes out of this test playing second fiddle to the Voyager GT but just barely. Without a doubt, OCZ’s new flash drive can hang with the big boys in the industry which is good news considering the nearly $100 price tag on this drive.