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.