OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. HD Tach 3.0.4.0.6. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. PCMark Vantage8. PCMark 79. AS SSD10. IOMeter11. SiSoft Sandra12. Real World Testing13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

This month we have seen the release of a handful of ultra fast Solid State Drives, and Kitguru has been on hand to review them in recent weeks. Today we are looking at the latest drive from market leader OCZ, the Agility 3 240GB. The Agility 3 has been released to compliment their recent Vertex 3 and Vertex 3 MAX IOPS drives, offering high performance but at a reduced price point.

The Agility 3 SATA III series of drives are designed to offer a tempting combination of performance and value. While the Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS is retailing for around £470 in the UK, the Agility 3 240GB will be sold for almost £100 less, retailing at around £378 inc vat.

As they are targeting the value oriented performance market this means OCZ will be releasing a 60GB version of the Agility 3, alongside the 120GB and the high end 240GB (which we are reviewing today).

The Agility 3 has rated speeds of up to 525MB/s read and 500 MB/S write with IOPS 4k performance rated to 35,000 read and 45,000 write. The 120GB version of the drive has a IOPS 4k rating of 20,000 read and 50,000 write. The 60GB version has an IOPS 4k rating of 10,000 read and 50,000 write.

Product	OCZ Agility 3
Interface	Sata III
Controller	Sandforce 2281
Size	240GB
SSD Type	Multi Level Cell
Trim Support	Yes
Read speed (rated)	525MB/s
Write speed (rated)	500MB/s
MBTF	2 Million hours

All of the SandForce SF-2000 series controllers still utilise the patented DuraWrite technology, on the fly compression which reduces the size of the data written to the drive. When this is paired up with wear leveling and intelligent block management the drive will require fewer write cycles during regular use.

We received one of the first retail samples of the 240GB drive in an eye catching green and black box with a list of main specifications on the front.

The bundle includes an installation leaflet on the product, a tongue in cheek ‘my SSD is faster than your HDD' sticker, and the drive itself protected in an anti static bag, sandwiched inside a protective container.

The drive is finished in a traditional OCZ green and black with the name of the product on the front. A fairly standard chassis design. It is opened by removing four small screws on the rear. Please be aware if you do this, you invalidate the warranty. We don’t really care, but if you buy one, you should.

The unit we have on review is 240GB and OCZ place a NAND flash partition of 16 ICs onto the PCB. Technically, new 25nm NAND FLASH memory has a reduced overall lifespan from 10,000 upwards to around 5,000 program/erase cycles. Industry insiders have hinted that consumer grade 25nm NAND flash memory will have a slightly lower lifespan, between 3,000 and 4,000 program/erase cycles.

While this sounds concerning, if you work out that under normal conditions only between 20-35 full SSD write cycles will be used each year, there is plenty of life in the product. Drive wearing protection also helps to ensure longer lasting flash memory. Thankfully, there is also full TRIM support.

As many already know Sandforce controllers use real time compression. The controllers store a ‘representation’ of your data, not the actual data itself which is achieved by creating a partition of the available NAND flash memory. It can handle around 63 MB/s from one of the eight available channels.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. 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.

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives for comparisons:
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
AS-SSD Benchmark
IOMeter
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration 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.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

With incompressible data, the Agility 3 performance suffers a little, but CrystalDiskMark offers an alternative ‘compressible' setting called 0x00 fill.

With the 0x00 0Fill setting, the test results are much higher scoring almost 500 MB/s with both sequential read and write. It is generally slower than the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS, pictured above. Although the 4k QD32 write speed is rated at 373.8MB/s compared to the MAX IOPS score of 359.7 MB/s.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. 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 possible.

Very close results, just lagging behind the more expensive drives between 7-15MB/s.

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.

A close run set of results, with the OCZ Vertex 3 and ADATA S511 almost neck and neck with the Agility 3 240GB.

We use Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Another closely run set of results in PCMark Vantage with the Agility 3 240GB coming out top in a few of the tests.

PCMark 7 is the latest benchmark suite from Futuremark and it includes 7 separate test suites combining more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming.

This is the first time we have used this particular benchmark suite, but we will be incorporating it from now on in our SSD reviews.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD uses incompressible data so the sequential write speed is lower than it would be otherwise. These scores indicate how far ahead the Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS is with this particular suite, thanks to the staggering performance in the 4k-64Trd read test, scoring over 250MB/s.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

In their official documentation OCZ rate the 4kb random/write performance at up to 45,000 IOPs, and the results we achieved were slightly higher than expected, scoring 45,187. A great series of results from all the latest OCZ units.

SiSoft Sandra is a benchmark tool that we use fairly regularly, it is a good all round synthetic software suite. Today we are obviously concentrating on the drive sections to ascertain the S511 and Vertex 3 performance levels.

Close results with the physical disks test, scoring almost 480 MB/s. The file system test shows dropped performance when compared against the Vertex 3 drives, falling to 217 MB/s.

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 and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup 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.

Only 1 second slower than the Vertex 3 240GB drives with this test, hardly noticeable and a great result.

Running this test multiple times we were able to mirror similar results, scoring the same as the Vertex 3 and Adata S511 drives – 18 seconds. The MAX IOPS managed a 1 second improvement with this test, barely noticeable, but repeatable.

The Agility 3 240GB SSD is a great addition to the OCZ family offering performance close to the Vertex 3 240GB drives, but with a much lower cash outlay.

When we look at the results, it is clear that the Agility 3 has weaker IOPS performance, and in some of the synthetic tests was delivering significantly lower performance with incompressible data bandwidth. As the CrystalDiskMark 0x00 0Fill option highlights, in a variety of situations it will be almost equal in performance with the Vertex 3.

These Sandforce powered drives are some of the fastest on the market with no discernible weaknesses. Sequential performance from the controller is fantastic and the 4k results are really pushing the platform ahead by leaps and bounds.

The main bonus with the Agility 3 drives will be the price point. This 240GB unit will cost almost £100 less than the Vertex 3 series, coming in at under £380 inc vat when they hit retail in the UK. These are significant savings, and as our real world tests show, many people might not notice the differences as a general boot drive and under gaming demands. The Agility series will also have a 60GB version, which will certainly be a viable option for a huge audience.

UK prices will be: 240GB £380 inc vat // 120GB £180 inc vat // 60GB £110 inc vat.

Pros:

• fantastic performance
• IOPS performance is still strong
• price point is extremely competitive, between £90-£100 less than 240GB Vertex 3
• 60GB version in this family will have a tempting price to performance ratio

Cons:

• Vertex 3 is faster

KitGuru says: a Stunning drive, with huge storage capacity for under £400. Well worth a shortlist.

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