| OCZ Technology Mega-Kart 8GB USB Flash Drive
|
The Basics:
Below we have the only two views you really need to consider with the Mega-Kart, as it is a rather simple device. The black plastic housing has the logo and capacity on one side, and is unprinted on the other side. The compact USB connector snaps into a pocket in the body of the 'card' and a rubberized cable gives you a little over an inch to reach your USB port.
 
The housing is quite compact and rigid, suggesting it should last for years to come. The one area that strikes me as less robust is the thin cable for the USB connector. It feels rather flimsy, and you don't have much length to work with, so a bit of bending and twisting is required in order to get the Mega-Kart connected to your PC. Additionally, with so little cable the Mega-Kart will generally be suspended by the connector while in use, and although the weight may not put much strain on the connection, it does leave itself prone being snagged or ripped out since it is such a large target (large as compared to other USB flash drives). Perhaps a rigid connector that hinged out from the devices edge would be more rugged?
I have said the Mega-Kart is the size of a credit card, and here is the proof. It is exactly the same size in length and width, and the thickness can be seen to be equivalent to four credit cards. Definitely compact, and definitely something you could store in a wallet or coat pocket with ease.
Performance:
Testing the Mega-Kart's performance consisted of running two benchmarks and then timing some real world data transfers.
The below left screen shot shows the results from HD Tach RW version 3.0.1.0, which shows impressive values for burst speed and average read speed. The CPU utilization seems a bit high at 10%, and a value not provided by this test is write speed. The below right screen shot shows the results from the SiSoftware Sandra 2007 Removable Storage benchmark. Here we see similarly impressive read speeds (rated as being 87x), and extremely poor write speeds (rated as being 2x). The write speeds seemed like they had to be a mistake, so I rebooted and ran the test again... no improvement.
 
Real world data transfers were monitored in four phases... large file write, small file write, large file read, and small file write. "Large files" were compromised of a total of three ISO files with a combined file size of 1772 MB. "Small files" were comprised of a total of 371 image files (JPG, GIF, and PNG) with a combined file size of 353 MB. Testing involved transferring the groups of files to and from a RAID 0 SATA hard drive array to the Mega-Kart via a rear panel USB 2.0 connection. A stop watch was used to monitor all times, a reboot was performed between each test, and the table below details the results.
Real world results echo what was seen in the benchmarks quite accurately. Read speeds are very fast, while write speeds are painfully slow. As with the benchmark results, these tests were also repeated (to no avail) just because I could not believe the disparity in values. Consider this... It would take about 227 minutes (3.8 hours) to fill the 8GB Mega-Kart with image files like this, and that is definitely not "high speed". Perhaps this is why no speeds are listed in the product specifications.
|
|
|
|
