It was bound to happen

It shouldn't be any surprise that literally an hour before my long-delayed USB Flash Drive Roundup goes live, Lexar's JumpDrive Secure II arrived at my doorstep. Needless to say I refrained from delaying the roundup anymore just to include this late comer, but I'll do my best to get it in to an updated roundup asap.

Why did the roundup take so long? Well, there are lots of side stories, products that arrived late, manufacturers that needed to follow up on some questions, and the usual problems you encounter with any 20 product roundup, but there's one cause for the delay that I do want to point out, for very good reasons.

This whole idea for a USB Flash Drive roundup started one evening when OCZ was telling me about their new dual channel flash drive, promising significantly higher performance than the competition. The idea of actual differentiation between flash drives piqued my interest, so I started looking into what was available and tried to get a good understanding of the market and its products.

It turned out that although OCZ was the first to advertise a dual channel USB flash drive as such, they weren't the first to actually produce one. In fact, many manufacturers paired up dual channel controllers with multiple flash devices, the marketing angle just seemed to have escaped them.

Now when I first received OCZ's product, it had not yet shipped to vendors, only to reviewers. Availability was promised to be about a week or so away from when reviews went live, so it wasn't such a big deal. But I encountered something interesting during my testing of the OCZ drive: although OCZ's Rally offered excellent read performance, its write speed was dismal. If you've read the roundup that just went live, you know that NAND flash writes much slower than it reads, but this drive stood out as being far too slow, especially given the competition. The drive was very slow not only in the Sandra tests but I first really noticed how poorly it was performing in a few of my home brewed tests.

I contacted OCZ and asked them if they had seen something similar, and they responded that they hadn't. They forwarded me some benchmarks that showed their drive performing very well on writes, but I wasn't totally satisfied. It turns out that they were focusing all of their attention on large file size performance, and hadn't really been looking at small file write performance (which, to their credit, very few manufacturers actually do). But here's where I quickly became impressed with the outcome of the situation; OCZ stopped production and shipping of this problematic drive (which was only the 512MB version) to all of their vendors, and made sure that not a single drive made it into the hands of a customer until the problem was fixed.

I commended OCZ for their handling of the situation in the review, but this brings up a very important topic that you all don't usually get to see from your perspective. Whenever we meet with manufacturers, we always bring them not only your feedback that you give us through comments, emails and forum posts, but also our feedback on how to improve their products. Above all, we're always interested in improving the end product that these manufacturers are selling. In my mind, the better the quality/performance/reliability of the average product out there, the better off we all are in the end. While we try to recommend only the best, the fact of the matter is that not everyone buys what we recommend, so there are folks that end up with sub-par hardware.

Most manufacturers take far too long to listen to our input, regardless of whether or not it comes directly from you guys or from us. Some will take it, agree with it, but never do anything about it beyond the lip service. There are a few manufacturers however, that do actually try to make products better based on this feedback, and in this case OCZ proved to be a great example of one of those such manufacturers.

Another recent example is actually ATI, with their CrossFire reference board. They took feedback from the overclocking community and put together the most feature-packed board we've ever seen. Unfortunately, ATI's issue these days isn't exactly features, but rather availability as we all know.

The moral of this story is that your feedback actually does get to manufacturers, and in some cases it will actually get directly put into the development or improvement of a product. These days there are a bit over 7 million readers that visit AnandTech every month, and although it may not seem like it, each and every one of you has a very powerful voice that can make some very big changes at the companies we all deal with.