Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals:
For starters, the housing of the Agility 3 is different than any prior OCZ branded SSD we’ve seen to date. Specifically, the top cover portion is made of plastic. This is not necessarily a bad thing – many other manufacturers choose entire housings made of plastic. So long as heat production is not an issue (as is the case for Sandforce controllers), this is a non-issue.
Once our warranty-voidance procedure is completed, we see the internals.
PCB top. Note the lack of cache memory (cache is integrated into the SF).
PCB bottom, showing 8 more flash parts.
Here we see the meat and potatoes. SF-2281 along side IMFT (Micron) Asynchronous flash memory.
Testing Methodology
Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!
Test System Setup
We’re breaking in a new SandyBridge testbed. Necessary for properly testing these new drives, even with the known issues. To get around this, we are using only the Intel SATA 6Gb/sec ports, which are known to not exhibit the inconsistent performance / connectivity issues.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K |
| Motherboard | Asus P8P67 Deluxe |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI |
| Video Drivers | Geforce 181.22 |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
| Operating System | Windows 7 X64 |
- PCMark05
- Yapt
- IOMeter
- HDTach
- HDTune
- PCPer File Copy Test
I tested a Vertex 2 120GB
I tested a Vertex 2 120GB against an Agility 3 120GB on an X58 (3Gb) and found them to be very close in most things with the Vertex having a slight advantage except for Random Read/Write 4KB (QD=1) and burst speeds.
I realize that the Agility 3 is designed for 6Gb so my test is not entirely fair.
dude, they both peak at
dude, they both peak at 275mb/s which is max speed for sata 3gbps…its not exactly a wonder why u cant see much of a difference when you put a 550mb drive on a 275mb line and compare it with a 275mb drive
Allyn: another good review.
Allyn: another good review. I’m just adding this Comment to remind you about our private correspondence, in which we discussed a test to determine if TRIM works on OS software RAIDs when the RAID members are formatted as “dynamic” partitions.
Cheers and … thanks for the great reviews!
MRFS