Performance

We compared the OCZ Roadster to the following USB devices:

• OCZ Rally 1GB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

We used HDTach in the following two benchmarks.


With transfer speeds of about 10 MB/s the Roadster is not the fastest USB drive, but it was not engineered to be fast. OCZ focused more on portability and convenience with the Roadster. If you want fast, you can get the OCZ Rally.


The high access time worries me a bit though. If you plan to work on a lot of small files this may become a bottleneck.

To get a feeling how the speed with different sized files is, we used the ATTO disk benchmark.


Like with all drives, performance gets better, the bigger the data chunks are. Also common to all USB sticks is that writes are slower than reads. Optimum file size is 64KB or bigger for maximum performance. In daily use you will almost never see files smaller than 64KB.