OCZ Agility 2 120GB SSD review

1. Introduction2. OCZ Agility 2 120GB SSD3. Testing Methodology4. Atto Disk Benchmark5. AS SSD Benchmark6. SiSoft Sandra Professional7. HD Tach8. IOMeter9. Real World Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

SSD drives haven't quite reached ‘mainstream' yet, however as more enthusiast users are realising the performance benefits, sales figures are increasing and the adoption rate is improving.

SSD performance is based around three areas, the Controller, the Firmware and the NAND. The controllers are massively important to the overall unit with products from Micron, Samsung, Sandforce, Toshiba, Indilinx and Intel making up the six big players. The Micron Marvell controller is right now the performance leader and we reviewed the Crucial RealSSD C300 256Gb drive a few weeks ago. This is the only current unit based around a 6GBps controller which means there is no real competition, unless you configure a dual Raid 0 configuration.

For many years OCZ have used tried and trusted Indilinx controllers but in recent months they moved to create units based around the Sandforce SF-1200 controller, which has helped them squeeze out more performance from the drives. This leads me into our review product today, the OCZ Agility 2 120GB which uses the very same controller.

Specifications	OCZ Agility 2 120GB
Size	99.88 x 69.63 x 9.3 mm
Operating Temp	0-70c
Max Performance	Read: up to 285MB/s Write: up to 275MB/s
Sustained write	up to 250 MB/s
4KB Random write	up to 10,000 IOPS
Shock Resistance	1500G, 0.5ms
Vibration	20G Peak, 10-20khz with 3 axis
MTBF	2,000,000 hours

The Agility 2 packaging is slim, neat and helps keep down shipping costs.

The unit is supplied with a 2.5″ to 3.5″ inch mounting adapter, documentation, mounting screws and an OCZ sticker which says ‘My SSD is faster than your HDD!”.

The drive is finished in the same colour scheme as the box, a rather fetching black with mint green stripe. The rear of the chassis has additional information on the specifications. The drive is based around a SATA II interface which is able to handle speeds of up to 300 MB/s.

OCZ use 16 flash chips with the formidable Sandforce SF-1200 controller which you can see located right in the middle of the PCB above. The Agility 2 does not use an additional DRAM cache chip like many others. The flash chips are manufactured by Intel with a capacity of 8GB each and are built on the 34nm engineering process.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4 which you can get yourself over here. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

We tested the Intel drives in both single mode and in Raid 0. There is a good chance that people buying one of these 40GB drives might in future add another for an inexpensive performance boost. We also like to test Raid 0 when we get a chance!

OCZ Agility 2 120GB SSD

Comparison Drives:
Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Buffalo 128GB Microstation
Intel X25-V 40GB (+Raid 0)
Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB SSD
OCZ Vertex 128GB
Intel X-25M 160GB SSD
Corsair P128 SSD

CPU: Intel Core i7 875k
Cooler: Noctua NH 14D
Motherboard: Intel DP55WG
Hard Drive: Western Digital 1TB
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz (4gb)
PSU: Enermax 1250w Revolution
Graphics: Zotac GTX465
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 2
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: LaCie 730 30 inch LED screen

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Atto Disk Benchmark
AS SSD Benchmark
SiSoft Sandra Professional
HD Tach
IOMeter

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration. Median averages were extrapolated from the results – this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Our Atto results are class leading for a single SATA 3Gbps drive with the Agility 2 knocking the Intel X25-M from the top spot in our read results. It also performed slightly better than the Vertex 2 in our write result, scoring over 273MB/s.

The AS SSD benchmark is another free utility which was created specifically with SSD’s in mind. It delivers a plethora of tests across sequential read and write and also places random read and write loads across a specific area of the drive. This is a good tool to use in conjunction with Windows 7 as it mirrors a very real world set of conditions.

The Agility 2 delivers consistently good results in both Sequential read and write tests, performing again at the top of the pack.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Again, the Agility 2 delivers a top listed set of both read and write results falling between Vertex 2 and Vertex drives.

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device.

In HD Tach the Agility 2 comes out top of the OCZ drives, just beating the Vertex 2. It falls slightly short of the Intel X-25M 160GB.

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry. Meanwhile Intel has discontinued work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The project is now driven by an international group of individuals who are continuously improving, porting and extending the product.

We set up new tests for this review, using both 512k sequential read and write and 4k random read and write to give an overall performance view of the drive. These are stellar results for the Sandforce controller.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.

This is the first OCZ drive to beat the Intel X25-M 160GB in our boot test, even if it is by only half a second. The single OCZ drive is only 1.5 seconds behind the Raid 0 X25 V configuration which is an incredible result.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times

Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.

The OCZ Agility 2 120GB performs exactly the same under OSX as the Vertex 2 did under our test conditions. This is only half a second slower than the Crucial C300, but it is worth pointing out that our Macintosh does not have a full SATA 600 connection meaning it is limited to the controller bandwidth.

The Agility 2 120GB drive continues the OCZ SSD winning run when utilising the Sandforce SF-1200 controller. They sell this particular model in sizes from 40GB to 480GB which covers the widest target audience possible … the 120GB model we reviewed is ideal for a home enthusiast user who needs plenty of space for applications and games.

The Agility 2 delivers class leading performance with read and write speeds well in excess of 250 MB/s and those of you who demand fast data writing will find this particular unit very inticing. We no longer have the original Agility drive at hand to compare directly against the new model however going on old data we have stored, this new unit appears to be around 4% faster. Not a massive difference, but nonetheless noticeable.

We are big fans of the Sandforce SF 1200 controller at KitGuru because it combines potent, yet balanced read and write performance across a variety of file size demands while offering  TRIM support.

The SSD market is a confusing minefield of prices right now which makes a purchase rather difficult until other options are taken into consideration. The Agility 2 120GB is retailing for around the £260-270 inc vat point in the UK which puts it head to head against other heavyweights such as the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB which offers a faster 355MB/s read speed (SATA 600 port required) but a slower 140MB/s write speed. The Sandforce based Corsair Force 120GB offers the same performance levels as the OCZ drive at slightly higher prices right now.

KitGuru says: The OCZ Agility 2 120gb is a fantastic SSD and we can comfortably recommend it, if you need a high performance combination of read and write speeds, then this should be on your immediate shortlist.

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