USB Drives… hmm, I’m running out of creative and interesting things to say about them to intro these reviews, and I’ve got a plethora of them yet to review.. better turn on the creativity here and get back into the game.

Anyway, today we’ve got another product from OCZ, yes it’s another USB drive, but this one is made for us urban warriors. The OCZ ATV drive with it’s rubberized housing is 100% weatherproof and shock resistant and being 32GB in capacity it can carry quite a bit of stuff for you also.

So without more chatter from me let’s continue on to find out how it compares to other drives I’ve got on hand…

The OCZ ATV 32GB USB Drive comes in everyone’s favorite plastic clamshell style package, we can see the ATV through the package and there’s some basic specs and features listed as well.

The OCZ ATV drive is made to be very resilient, and most likely will handle anything you throw at it, or on it. The housing is rubberized making it weatherproof and shock resistant and easy to grip as well.

The cap of course is removable but the ATV features a little attachment on the keychain so you can secure the cap when the drive is in use so you don’t lose it.

Specifications:

OCZ ATV 32GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive

Model: OCZUSBATV32G

The shock-proof ATV features mainstream speeds offering consumers an affordable option and was designed to safely accommodate a wealth of important data and media files. Not only are these premium flash drives aggressively fast at transferring files of all types and sizes, but are optimized for Windows Vista Ready Boost, offering true performance advantages to this latest operating system.

ATV flash drives feature durable and colorful rubber tread housing, which is a 100% weatherproof storage solution to keep digital files safe in any conditions, even fully submerged in water. The attached cap holder will help prevent misplacement of the protective key cover, while the chain can easily fasten to your key ring for ultimate portability.

Features:
-High Speed USB 2.0 Certified
-True Plug and Play (Compatible with MAC OS X)
-Dual Channel Technology
-Waterproof Rubber Housing
-Orange LED Status Light
-Lifetime Warranty

The OCZ ATV has an orange LED on it that blinks to indicate activity:

On to the testing…

As usual first up is Sisoft Sandra 2009 SP2 Removable Storage Benchmark, ordering is lowest to highest

According to SiSoft Sandra the OCZ ATV isn’t that good overall, but let’s dig a bit deeper..

next is the 256MB files test.

ok, with 6 Ops/min Read Performance and 3 Ops/min Write Performance the OCZ ATV sort of falls into the middle of the chart.

Next up for testing is DiskBench and the times it takes to Copy To, Copy From and Read From the USB Drives. For the testing I used a 350MB .AVI Video file. Ordering is best to worst, lower scores are better of course as we are talking about time in seconds.

The OCZ ATV falls directly in the middle of the chart, and we can see it easily bests the PNY 32GB drive.

Next is the transfer rates for the tasks, higher is better and chart is ordered best to worst again. Ordering is using Copy To or write speed for reference.

I’m very surprised the OCZ ATV did not hit 30MB/s transfer rates fro Read and Copy From tasks, but still it’s not bad at all.

One problem with comparisons like this is that inherently smaller drives are faster than larger ones overall, so it gives us a comparison yes, but is it a good comparison? Sort of, in that at least it gives us an idea of the performance, don’t worry though I’ve got more 32GB drives so it’ll even out in the end.

Conclusion:
The OCZ ATV 32GB USB drive is admirably well made, it provides excellent protection for your data, and being 32gigs it can carry quite a bit. When compared to the PNY 32gb drive it easily bests it in sheer performance, so if you’ve got a choice between the two obviously the OCZ wins hands down.

The performance of the OCZ ATV is about average, honestly I expected a bit more from it, but it’s just the ‘regular’ version and not the ATV Turbo that’s also available from OCZ, so I’m sure things would look quite different when using the Turbo version.

Pros:
100% Weatherproof
Decent speeds overall
Rubberized housing for durability and ruggedness

Cons:
Dust and lint collector

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance