OCZ's Agility 2 Reviewed: The First SF-1200 with MP Firmware
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 21, 2010 7:22 PM ESTFinal Words
OCZ's Agility 2 marks the beginning of mass production availability of SandForce hardware. We're not talking about release candidate firmware anymore, this is final hardware shipping with final firmware. SandForce told me that it's not aware of any major, potentially data threatening bugs in the SF-1200 mass production firmware. While something could always crop up (as we've seen from both Crucial and Intel in recent history), SandForce is very confident in what its partners are shipping today.
Despite the sort of handicap throwing fully randomized data at the SF-1200 provides, real world performance of the Agility 2 and other SandForce drives supports the idea that the DuraWrite architecture actually does work. The ironic thing is that the drives work so well in traditional desktop workloads that it's tough to believe they were originally designed for use in enterprise applications (which are potentially more random in the contents of their data). If you do have a highly random workload (or workload that's not easily compressible), then you end up with a drive that performs worse than any Intel or Indilinx solution. Something I theorized back in the early days of looking at SandForce, but something we're able to prove easier with the Q2 2010 branch of Iometer. I don't believe the Iometer results we've seen thus far are indicative of the sort of real-world performance you can expect out of SF-1200 drives on the desktop, but they're important to understand. Remember that SandForce itself found that installing Windows + Microsoft Office 2007 resulted in less than 50% of the data actually being written to the drive. Desktop usage models appear to work very well with SandForce's architecture.
Looking at the Agility 2 itself, you're not paying a tremendous premium for SandForce here but it is more expensive than anything from Intel or Indilinx:
| SSD Pricing Comparison | |||||||
| Drive | NAND Capacity | User Capacity | Drive Cost | Cost per GB of NAND | Cost per Usable GB | ||
| Corsair Force | 128GB | 93.1GB | $410 | $3.203 | $4.403 | ||
| Corsair Nova | 128GB | 119.2GB | $369 | $2.882 | $3.096 | ||
| Crucial RealSSD C300 | 256GB | 238.4GB | $680 | $2.656 | $2.852 | ||
| Intel X25-M G2 | 160GB | 149.0GB | $489 | $3.056 | $3.282 | ||
| OCZ Agility 2 | 128GB | 93.1GB | $379 | $2.960 | $4.071 | ||
| OCZ Vertex LE | 128GB | 93.1GB | $394 | $3.078 | $4.232 | ||
In our real world tests you're looking at roughly a 5 - 10% performance increase over Intel/Indilinx in typical use cases, and obviously much more if you're doing a lot of sequential writes compared to Intel. Do the drives "feel" faster than Intel's X25-M and other Indilinx offerings? It's tough to quantify, but I'd say they do. Everything seems a bit snappier than on machines I've configured with an X25-M G2. If you're looking for the absolute fastest SSDs on the market today you really only have two options: SandForce or Crucial (you can always just RAID two X25s together as well).
Then there's the issue of what SF-1200 based SSD to buy. With the Agility 2 you'll get the standard SF-1200 performance, while the Vertex 2 and Corsair's Force drives will give you a bit more in random write IOPS. Given the small price premium I'd almost recommend the Vertex 2 over the Agility 2. However as we've seen from our real world performance results, the performance impact is negligible. While I'm still testing all of this in actual systems, I presently don't believe the Vertex 2's additional performance is necessary for desktop use.
That brings us to the Corsair Force. Corsair's drive effectively gives you the performance of the Vertex 2, however there's the concern that we have no idea what the future firmware upgrade path will entail. As we've shown though, the standard SF-1200 performance isn't far off at all in the real world for desktop use.
I'll have to end this review with my usual words of caution. This is the first drive we've tested with SandForce's mass production firmware. While I've done my usual and put these drives in my own personal systems to test long term stability it's going to be a some time before we know how reliable these drives are going to be in the long run. I'm very pleased with the performance we're seeing here today, but we're just going to have to wait and see how the drives do in the field before making a blanket recommendation. Just be aware of the potential for problems that I haven't encountered in my review to crop up. As always, I'll keep you posted with anything I find.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
60 Comments
View All Comments
ogc - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
That file 512mb in size which compresses 1000x seems to simply full of zeros, so it represents best case performance for sandforce. On the other hand pure random writes are not expected in typical computer usage so they also are not very meaningful. Any chance to feed iometer with data from your storage bench for example?arehaas - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I actually think random writes with compressed files are meaningful.JPEG files are highly compressed - you can gain only 1-3% by zipping them. Those who work with such files a lot - write to the disk or move around jpegs or similar compressed graphic and video files - should be paying most attention to these new tests for Sandforce. It may be a good idea to add the results for all (most) drives to the page with random writes chart as another chart "Random Writes - Compressed files".
arehaas - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Thanks to the new tests, it appears the charts of rnd or seq writes are currently misleading with respect to Sandforce, if most of your important files (e.g., for a graphic designer) are compressed. The charts are easier to read than text. Currently, one has to flip pages to and from the "Random Data performance page" in order to get the true picture. Maybe Anand can add a bar with "Corsair with compressed data" to the read/write charts? Thanks.davepermen - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I guess that drive is not that well suited for video editing, where you have mostly random data (compressed and uncompressed, both look rather random to the drive). it wouldn't be bad in any way, just lose it's peak performance.FragKrag - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Up until about a week or two ago I was set on an Intel X25-M G2 80GB, but now I'm not so sure anymore. If I got a Vertex 2/Agility 2, it would be a 50GB version... decisions decisions.Oh, and prompted by this article, I looked for the pricing of the Vertex Indilinx on Newegg, and I found this 50GB Vertex LE at $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
never knew they had a 50GB run of Vertex LEs...
willscary - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
After my problems last week, I ended up going back to the Crucial M225 series with the Indilinx controller. It is not quite as fast, but it does have a 5 year warranty. I paid $325 for the 128GB drives and a very low $579 for a 256GB drive from Newegg.I have been using these drives in several machines since the beginning of the year. They all support TRIM and I have had no problems. They are very fast in daily use. I had hoped the Sandforce drives would be faster, but I guess I will have to wait for a later date to find out (I will be purchasing another pair of computers in July after the new fiscal year begins...perhaps I will purchase the Sandforce SSDs at that time).
Look09 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
What happens when you use TrueCrypt to encrypt your OS.? Does it then random-write everything and indilinx is better? Does it make the Vertex 2 much better? Or no difference?Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Encrypted data should look like random noise, and as a result should have very little compressibility. I haven't used TrueCrypt, but it's my understanding that it writes garbage data to whatever part of the hidden partition isn't in use, so the whole thing should largely be uncompressible and match our random data performance.semo - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I'm interested in encrypted testing also. These controllers are beginning to look like very fast consumer drives rather than enterprise (if the SATA interface wasn't a big enough hint already).I'm also wondering why are they getting a more substantial performance hit when writing compressed random 4k writes compared to 2MB sequential writes (74.4% vs 57.4%).
Just to re instate, why are all these SSD makers coming out with SATA drives and calling them enterprise? AFAIK, Intel and Hitachi are working on an SAS SSD but I'm not aware of any other reasonable company doing the same (i'm totally ignoring what the military might have because costs there are nuts).
Mugur - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
... Too bad that the price is still high so I'm very interested for the low-end 40 GB ones, but with good random 4k writes. I have 5 machines at home waiting for this upgrade as the boot drive. :-)Allow me to thank you, Anand, for your dedication and work.