Introduction

With Solid-State Drives (SSD) on the verge of mass consumer adoption, we're left wondering what kind of performance we're going to see from these drives. We already know SSD's require less power than drives with moving parts, but what kind of performance gains will we see? To get an idea, we took one the faster drives on the market, the OCZ Rally2, and ran it through our benchmarking process. To make things more interesting (and see how much performance we could squeeze from the technology, we're using two drives later in this article to use the drives in a RAID0 configuration.

The Rally2 relies on dual-channel technology, much like you'll find in modern PC RAM configurations. The flash inside the drive is separate into two parts, allowing for faster writes, reads, and access times.

A Closer Look

For 2GB of Storage, the Rally2's casing is hardly what I expected to find. This drive is sleek. It's tiny, sturdy, and attractive. The chassis and cap are both made from aluminum, while the end opposite the USB connector is smoked plastic with an LED inside to indicate activity. Check this out compared to my older 256MB San Disk Cruzer and even a first generation iPod shuffle.

With it's tiny size, we had no trouble plugging two of them in right next to each other.