Thursday 6 December 2007

Product Review: OCZ ATV Turbo Flash Drive

When a business depends on a system or component's horsepower to accomplish things faster to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness, one looks for items that can help along those lines.

For 3DS Max (3D Studio Max), more cores plus RAM plus GHz means more frames rendered per minute. Having more cores across the corporate rendering "farm" means more frames rendered as well.

As we are delving into the creation, management, and deployment of Windows Vista WIM images via network share, we need to have a quick device to boot the system with since we have not graduated to Windows Deployment Services yet.

Using a network share based deployment will be the environment we will be working with at our smaller client sites where server transitions may not be as frequent as the larger ones.

So far, we have used an 8GB Transcend (JF V10) which had dismal performance. We did not keep this one too long.

The 1GB Kingston Elite Pro did pretty good. It managed to boot the WinPE environment is a respectable amount of time.

We ended up bringing in an 8GB and a couple of 4GB OCZ ATV Turbo flash drives to test out their ability to boot WinPE quicker.

We were pleasantly surprised. They are fast!

The online reviews were accurate. They definitely can pull their own weight when it comes to bringing the WinPE environment up at least 20-30% faster than the Kingston Elite Pro did!

This speed improvement will save our client's money where we will be required to be on-site for their deployments. It will also save us a lot of time for our training lab deployments.

They will also be our Technician's Thumb Drive and for booting DOS for BIOS updates and the like.

Links: Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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