A few weeks ago I reviewed the OCZ Rally2 64gb Flash Drive, and the results weren’t that good really, especially for the write speeds. So I got together with Lisa and Eric from over at OCZ and we found out that it seems I got one of the first batches of Rally2 64gb USB Drives with the older firmware on it. There is a quick and easy fix for the slow write speed problem though, just a firmware update that you can do yourself if you happen to have one of the first Rally2’s that were released. So read on to learn more on how to get the firmware and see what the differences are before and after the firmware upgrade.

The firmware upgrade itself is very easy to do, just download the Zip file HERE, and read the included text file for instructions. The instructions are easy, just run the program, it’s automatically done for you. Two little details are that the firmware update program only works on Windows Xp and with USB2.0 ports only. For most people the USB2.0 should not be a problem, but for those of us using Vista we’ve got to find an XP machine to use. Supposedly there is going to be a Vista version released though. The entire process takes about 2 minutes total, simple and worth it.

So let’s take a look at the before and after flash or firmware upgrade results.

First up is SiSoft Sandra 2009 Sp3 Removable Storage Benchmark.

As you can see there is a nice increase in the overall performance of the Rally2 after the flash

Here’s the 256MB files test results:

As you can see the write performance doubled.

Next up is DiskBench, I used a 350MB .AVI video file for testing Copy To, Copy From and Read From.

First we have the time it took to do the tasks, lower is better of course:

The Read and Copy From performance got a little better but not much, the Copy To or Write Performance shows a dramatic increase is speeds, we see the time dropped by 12.21 seconds.

Here’s the transfer rates in MB/s for those tests:

For my testing we gained 5.96MB/s speed for writing to the Rally2, which pushed it into the specs listed for the Rally2 of 15-20MB/s transfer rates.

Finally here’s testing using ATTO Dick Benchmark, personally I don’t use ATTO often as I don’t feel it represents real world results, but it is used by many companies to test their products.

ATTO runs several tests, read and write and the following graph shows the highest speeds achieved before and after the firmware upgrade.

You can see I hit 26.5 MB/s for the write speeds, which is excellent.

So basically the first batch of Rally2 drives that went out had the original firmware on it, the ones out there now available for purchase should have the upgraded firmware. If you happen to have one of the older drives though you can easily make it faster…

Going back though with this new information I can revise the review scoring to give the Rally2 a 9 out of 10 score. The reasoning is that it still isn’t quite the fastest out there, but it’s very close.

In conclusion the Rally2 is a nice, fast drive with a large capacity that most anyone should be happy with.