Storage Is the OCZ Agility 3 drive a good drive?

Afternoon chaps.

I'm about to buy an SSD and i'm just deciding between the above drive and a M4 drive.

Any thoughts guys?

I hope these SSD's are all what they are hyped up to be.

Thanks.

 

You post just made me check the pricing again, I always thought the M4 was better value, but for drives at 128GB or less not any more tho! I think the Agility 3 120gb would be better, most notably because the top speeds on the M4 drives are achieved by having all the memory channels filled, this only occurs on the 256GB and 512gb drives, the others have some of the channels unused.

So I would say the new sandforce drives are always faster and for capacity less than 128GB can be better value (like the Agility 3). For capacities over 256GB the M4 is still slower but is much better value.

And I think the reality about performance is I think you would have to be some kind of rainman-esque freak to notice the real world difference on any of these drives in real world day to day use, they are all super fast.

 

With the latest firmware the drive is very good indeed. Its a shame it wasnt as reliable as it shiould have been to start but this was a Sandforce issue rather than a manufacturer issue as the reliability effected the corsair units too if you scan your memory back

The M4 is excellent though and if your not into OCZ, the Corsair Force 3 is also a good choice.

 

Forgot to mention that it is the 64gb version i'm going for.

Im not attached to any company really its just this one caught my eye.

 

Here is a good very recent set of benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sf-2200-sandforce-ssd,2987.html

I think the M4 is probably the best bet at the moment, it doesn't appear to have the firmware issues Sandforce controllers have, and in actual performance seems just as good (ignore raw sequential figures).

 

They are all the same price but the Agility 3 should go faster than the M4 (and significantly faster on the writes by the looks of things) although the M4 has slightly more storage (64GB vs 60GB).

 

I've heard of instances of OCZ drives not being detected if they're set as the boot drive. It seems to be an intermittant problem.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4346/ocz-agility-3-240gb-review

Almost as good as a Vertex 3

 

Haven't had issues with that. I just got an OCZ Agility 3 60GB, was the cheapest pick out of the SATA3 Sandforce lot and incredibly impressed.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I ordered earlier today along with a new motherboard

All repped and what not.

 

Just FYI, you can't look at a review of the performance of a 240 Gb version of an SSD and know how the 60 Gb version will perform.

There can be a huge difference in the performance due to things like number of channels used in parallel, and the number and density of chips on each channel.

AnandTech's Bench section lets you compare SSD's, check out this comparison of the 60 Gb vs 240 Gb versions of the Agility 3 (when both are on a SATA 6 GBPS port):

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/402?vs=373

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/120g...6gb-s-ssd-read-550mb-s-write-500mb-s-75k-iops

Make sure to get the MAX IOPS version

 

Slight price difference there though MSHunter

£88.32 for the Agility 3 60 Gb, £217.34 for the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 120 Gb

If you can afford the Vertex 3 MAX IOPS drive that's certainly what I'd go for too, but not everyone has that kind of cash to spend on an SSD

 

.... yes there is also a slight difference in size. But in general higher IOPS and newer Sandforce controller is better. the SF controller in the MAXiops is the first one to really beat a C300 or M4 across the board.

in his shoes a small C300 or M4 would be fast/better.

 

In real world scenarios the differences between the M4 and Agility 3 (60GB) - or any fast SSD for that matter - would be inconsequential given the boost either/any of them given over a HDD.

 

I agree, you'll never, ever notice a few MB/s difference except in benches, so what does it really matter? Unless you're petty like that

 

As a boot drive the vertex 3 is better but the m4 is better for incompressible data.

 

used to be true but not since the new Sandforce driver. at least according to reviews.

 

It is true - the Sandforce controller manages to get such high performance by compressing data. If the data can't be compressed, the performance drops a lot.

 

Currently looking at 120gb ssds atm and the adata s511 series look quite good, from reviews I've seen they have quite similar performance to a vertex 3 but are about the same price as an agility 3 (£93 for 60 gb and £162 for 120gb).

Having looked at quite a lot of different reviews though it does seem that depending on what tests they do you can make different ssds look best, I doubt the variation in speed in general use (they'll all be way faster than a hard disk).