OCZ Rally2 8GB flash drive

I purchased two OCZ Rally2 8GB flash drives the other day from Amazon.. They were $19.95 each and they arrived today.

They are constructed pretty well and have an aluminum housing that feels secure unlike the plastic housings that many other flash drives have. The cap does not particularly fit very snugly and when you take the cap off, it does not fit on the other end of the flash drive so you must be sure you don’t misplace the cap or you’ll lose it. And misplacing small caps must be relatively common because the OCZ website has a link to order replacement caps. Brilliant.

There is a bright orange LED activity light and it is extremely bright. I would say obnoxiously bright. When the drive is being accessed, the light flashes and in a dark room, with the flash drive plugged into the DDS80 on the top side of the controller, your rig looks like a blinking Christmas tree. I’ll be looking for some sort of cover to place over the flashing LED since it is so distracting.

Now let me talk about the wacky experience I had with the OCZ flash drive. I opened the package and put the drive into a USB port on my PC laptop. I loaded about 60 songs onto it and then ran the Numark Librarian software on it. I then plugged the drive into the DDS80 and it was mounted and seemed to work with no issues on the DDS80. I ejected the drive and then plugged it into my iMac with OS 10.5.7. It failed to mount. I ran Disk Utility and it was recognized in Disk Utility, but still would not mount. I attempted to Verify the drive, but it would not verify either. When I tried to format the drive in the iMac, I got an error that said the drive could not be unmounted. This was too weird and made no sense. I called OCZ tech support and they were not able to provide any useful advice except to say that I could return it for exchange.

I then took the drive back to the PC and reformatted it. Then I put it back in the iMac and this time it mounted with no problem. I loaded up some music onto it and basically filled it nearly to capacity and then ran Numark Librarian on it. It now seems to be fine on both the PC and the iMac as well as working in the DDS80.

I don’t feel very confident as to the reliability of it however since I had so many issues with it earlier in the day. I’ve got to say that the issue of bullet-proof reliability and performance with the DDS80 and flash drives is still very much up in the air. I am not anywhere near ready to entrust a Wedding to this equipment.

I’m tempted to order a 16GB and 32GB OCZ Rally2 flash drive to see if they will work in the DDS80. Since Numark isn’t apparently testing these various drives, someone might as well.

If you’ve had experience with any flash drives, please comment and include the manufacturer and size of the flash drive that you are using.