I recently purchased an OCZ USB 2.0 32GB shock-resistant, water proof flash drive from newegg.com for backing up critical files from several dual- and quad-core Dell servers. The drive was about $150 (now $179.99 and out of stock) – a little high for 32GB, but the convenience of having all that data on a keychain was simply too hard to resist.

When I used the drive for the first time, I was expecting some pretty impressive transfer speeds. OCZ, the drive manufacturer, indicates that the 32GB drive uses dual-channel tech to speed things up. In theory, it sounds great. In practice… not so much.

The first major chunk of data transferred was a 4GB folder with about 800 files. From the point of drag-and-drop to the moment the data transfer completed, the 32GB drive took just under 490 seconds, or roughly 8 mins and 8-10 seconds.

I thought this was a bit odd, so I made the same backup with a 500GB SATA drive using a Thermaltake BlacX USB 2.0 drive bay. The same transfer took about 128 seconds, or 2 mins 8 seconds.

I then repeated the backup with an old beater 8GB flash drive from Corsair. The same 4GB folder transferred in about 230 seconds, or 3 mins 50 seconds.

In this nerdy chart, shorter bars are better. Stats are in seconds.

I got slightly better results moving larger individual files, like 500MB and 1GB video files. No major change when formatted and used on my MacBook Pro.

As for data storage, the OCZ 32GB drive is hard to beat. 29.86GB formatted, this thing will fit TONS of data. I could back up critical files from all my servers with this little drive. I could easily move my entire iTunes library off my MacBook Pro’s hard drive and free up many, many gigs of space. I can have my Win 2000, XP and Ubuntu OSes boot via Parallels from this drive. But because the throughput of the OCZ 32GB flash drive is nowhere near as fast as I was expecting, I’ll have to shelf my dreams of speedy keychain backups of my servers.