On Our Desk - 12

OCZ Rally2 32GB

Manufacturer: OCZ
UK Price: £90.99 (incl. Delivery)
US Price: $101.99 (incl. Delivery)

Ah, now a USB key. We usually have a metric tonne of these lying around the office and we usually rope four or five together into an On Our Desk feature, but this time we’ve hit a bit of a drought and only have the one USB stick to look at.

Speaking of which, do they even have official names? We’ve heard everything from USB key to Memory Stick to Thumb Drive to Data Depository and it’s all starting to get a little bit confusing.

Over the last few On Our Desk features we’ve done a number of little tests on these…whatever you want to call them. We’ve discovered that as far as the usual consumer is concerned the matter of ruggedness isn’t really an issue.

Sure, if you’re a pioneering geographer who is often found hiking up the side of an erupting volcano then you’ll want to have your data (and probably your will and testament) stored on something like the Corsair Survivor GT. If your day to day life is a little more sedentary though and the only risk you stand to face is passing out through sheer boredom and drowning in a bowl of cornflakes then any old USB stick will do. They are nearly all waterproof and shockproof by design, so ruggedizing the design doesn’t really add much.


Thus, this time, we’ve chosen to look at an unruggedized type of USB key, because capacity is going to be of more important to most readers than the ability to withstand a direct nuclear blast and subsequent fallout. In reality, as long as the construction can withstand being jangled around on your keyring then you probably don't have anything to worry about.

On the topic of security though, it's worth pointing out that the OCZ Rally2 doesn't come with any encryption software bundled on it, as some other USB keys tend to do. In our eyes though that's actually a plus, as the first thing we do is delete that software anyway. If you're worried about security to the point of encrypting your drive then you'll be unlikely to trust the first software given to you. Your paranoia probably has a different encryption tool in mind involving phases of the moon, your children's birthdays and what you intend to eat for lunch.

The reality is that most people needn't bother with it for the most part anyway as they'll be carrying essays, .MP3s, video and save games on their data stick - hardly volatile material. If you're carrying personal or identifying data on the other hand, then yes it probably is worth encrypting your drive, though you have to question the wisdom of carrying identifying data on your keyring and not uploading it to a secure FTP in order to retrieve it at your destination.

So, what are the strengths of the OCZ Rally2? Well, capacity is something that the Rally2 has got in spades, with room for a whopping 32GB of data on there while still being no bigger than any average USB drive measuring in at 65x15x5mm.


The construction is solid too, though that’s more of a style issue than a strength one. A thin veneer of black matte metal means you can wear it on your keyring with pride and disregard any nearby fellows with plastic USB keys with judicious contempt.

One more thing that’s important to every-day users though is transfer speed, so we did a basic read and write test on the Rally2 by moving a large 140MB video file across from the PC to the USB key – which took just nine seconds under Vista, impressively. Transferring the same file back took less than a second, so you can easily consider the Rally2 to be as fast as anything else on the market.

There are a few things which might put off some users though, namely that the orange LED which lights up when the USB is in use is bright enough to burn even Supermans retinas away if he looked at them directly. Users will also have to accept the fact that they will inevitably lose the cap to the memory stick.

Still, we’d certainly call these minor faults at best as the Rally2 is a very decent, high capacity and good looking USB stick that does an excellent job of carrying data. Does it have any super remarkable features? Well, no, but then it doesn’t really need them.

Verdict: Expensive, but as tough as you need and storage to spare.