OCZ Agility SATA II 2.5″ Solid State Drive
We review OCZ’s latest mainstream solid state drive which promises great perfomance at a consumer friendly price-point.
| Manufacturer: |
|
| Price: |
|
| Solid State Drives (SSD) are must have storage devices these days among enthusiasts. With their fast performance and low power requirements, there are a lot of pluses with this technology when compared to traditional hard drives. Granted, they do not yet provide the massive storage space of today’s consumer drives, and SSDs are far more expensive than those drives as well. |
{mosmodule module=AdsenseContent}
|
Solid State Drives (SSD) are must have storage devices these days among enthusiasts. With their fast performance and low power requirements, there are a lot of pluses with this technology when compared to traditional hard drives. Granted, they do not yet provide the massive storage space of today’s consumer drives, and SSDs are far more expensive than those drives as well.
While SSDs have been available for awhile, the technology is relatively new. The OCZ Agility we will be reviewing today is OCZ’s newest SSD which addresses a few concerns many people have about SSDs. One is cost, as the Agility is aimed at mainstream users, at a lower cost per GB when compared to other performance drives:
“The new Agility Series of SSDs are the latest addition to the OCZ lineup of solid state drives and are designed for cost-conscious consumers seeking the performance and reliability benefits of SSDs at an aggressive price,” commented Ryan Edwards, Director of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. “The new Agility Series drives make use of cache to deliver better performance over a wide range of functions and applications, all at a price point that makes sense for everyday users.”
Typically, “mainstream” is perceived as “flat and average”, but the Agility series is marketed as more than that:
“Featuring the latest controller design, exceptional speed, and onboard cache, the OCZ Agility Series delivers the performance and reliability of SSDs at less cost per gigabyte than other high speed offerings currently on the market. The Agility Series is the result of all the latest breakthroughs in SSD technology, including an efficient controller design, speedy 230MB/sec read and 135MB/sec write speeds, along with 64MB of cache. “
Finally, long term reliability is something of a question mark of many SSDs. Initially, performance will be spectacular, but over time, many individual reviews have pointed out that performance begins to degrade. While this is not going to be possible to test with the timeframe we had, generally the degradation does level off and still offers performance that is better than traditional drives. That said, OCZ does provide a solid warranty and state the expected lifespan:
“Designed for ultimate reliability, Agility Series SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) ensuring peace of mind over the long term. All Agility Series SSD drives come backed a two year warranty and OCZ’s legendary service and support. “
If you’ve never seen a SSD up close, it’s visually uninspiring. That isn’t a bad thing, but just a fact. Given that most hard drives don’t “look” impressive either, we’ll call this a draw. As with most SSD devices, the OCZ Agility is a 2.5” design, making it an option for notebook users. It will work just fine in desktop setups as well, but the majority of desktop cases cannot secure a 2.5” drive just yet. The Agility measures 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm and weighs in at 77g. It’s offered in multiple capacities, and as mentioned in the title of the review, we’ll be looking at the 120GB version.
The capacity may be a bit confusing for some of you, as we’re used to seeing multiples of 1024 MB equaling 1 GB, but here is an excerpt from OCZ’s product page:
Consumers may see a discrepancy between reported capacity and actual capacity; the storage industry standard is to display capacity in decimal. However, the operating system usually calculates capacity in binary format, causing traditional HDD and SSD to show a lower capacity in Windows. In the case of SSDs, some of the capacity is reserved for formatting and redundancy for wear leveling. These reserved areas on an SSD may occupy up to 5% of the drive’s storage capacity. On the Vertex Series the naming convention reflects this and the 30 is equivalent to 32GB, the 60 is equivalent to the 64GB and so on.
The OCZ Agility does differ from other 2.5” drives in that it is housed in an alloy shell which serves mostly to protect the drive. We cannot imagine a scenario where a user can cause physical harm to their workstation and lose only the Agility. However, before anyone starts tossing their PC out the window to test, this sort of abuse will not be covered by OCZ’s two year warranty.
Looking towards the rear of the drive, there are two connections for SATA data and power. Unlike the OCZ Solid next to the Agility pictured to the below, there is no USB connection as the Agility is meant to be installed internally.
Let’s move on and checkout the performance.
Testing
We will be testing the OCZ Agility SSD using real-world file transfers. The test bed will be an i7 965 Extreme, MSI X58 motherboard, a Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive and 6GB of Corsair Dominator. The OS is Windows 7 RC 64-Bit, all recent updates applied. While we understand the OS isn;t final, it is almost complete and should be representative of the performance you can expect out of the final version.
The OCZ Agility will be compared directly against the OCZ Solid.
Along with HDTach 3.0.4.0, we will be testing small file transfer, medium file transfer and a large file transfer. We will also perform a boot test as well as compare the performance post-6 weeks. We will explain later. Before we begin, let’s look at some HDTach performance.
The OCZ Agility has an average read speed of 216.4 MB/sec with a CPU utilization of roughly 4%. Unlike hard drives, where you tend to see performance taper as you move through the platters, the Agility is pretty consistent throughout.
Small File Transfer
For the small files, we have a Doom 3 installation, with 250 files spread across a few folders and totals 1.85GB. Files will be copied from the Seagate hard drive to the OCZ Agility (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Agility back to the hard drive.
The Agility excels in small file transfers, trumping the Solid by a fair margin, especially in the write testing.
Medium File Transfer
For the medium file, we have a Vista 64-Bit Service Pack 1 nstallation, which is a compressed 743 MB file. The file will be copied from the Seagate hard drive to the OCZ Agility (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Agility back to the hard drive.
The write speeds are close but the burst read speed is well in the OCZ Agility’s favor. The Agility was effectively twice as fast.
Large File Transfer
For the large file, we have a Windows MCE recorded movie of Appaloosa, which is a is 3.9 GB total. The file will be copied from the Seagate hard drive to the OCZ Agility (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Agility back to the hard drive.
Another close one, with the Agility holding the lead.
Final Words
Before we wrap things up, one of the appealing reasons to get a solid state drive is how quick things can load. Here’s our results from booting up Windows 7 RC:
Game loading is also about 40% faster, taking less than 5 seconds to load up some levels of Call of Duty Modern Warfare for example. Between the OCZ Agility and Solid, we didn’t see much difference in game loads, and even Windows loading, it is pretty close.
Long-term performance was an issue brought up with some articles we’ve seen. It would be difficult to clearly look at this, but we tried anyhow. We mimicked a typical home environment as closely as possible. The OCZ Agility was my primary drive on my main computer, loaded with my usual applications such as Office, Photoshop and my various testing applications. We’ve deleted and copied files to the drive almost on a daily basis, and forced myself out of the habit of weekly defragmentation. We held off on our review a bit longer testing short term performance and about six weeks after our initial setup, the benchmarks are still consistent and we did not experience any degradation in performance. We won’t be able to comment 6 months to a year down the line, but we feel pretty confident all should be well. The results you’ve seen today matched (sometimes above, sometimes below after several test runs, so this minimizes errors in testing) those results 6 weeks later.
As we’ve pointed out in the specs, power consumption is low and as a result the drive produces very little heat.
If there would be any downside, it would be the price per Gigabyte. For a SSD, we feel the price is very good as the OCZ Agility rings in slightly cheaper than competing drives. Of course, comparing price per Gigabyte to a mechanical desktop hard drive will paint a different picture, but it is no secret both drives are in completely different classes.
If you’re looking for a speedy drive to make your new primary partition, the OCZ Agility should be on your short list. It is fast, as well as consistently speedy for the last several weeks.
If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
