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.
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529th - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Some people are curious about the Vertex LE 50g version. Yes, I've read the Vertex LE 100g review :)50g Vertex LE: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
New Egg's description says "For enthusiasts w/ up to 15,000 4KB random write IOPS" which would suggest the controller is the SF 1200 where as the Vertex LE SSD drives are suppose to have the SF 1500 controller which will do ~ 30,000 4kb so the inconsistency brings up curiosity. To make matters worse, The OCZ website says they use the SF 1500 controller. Which I vaguely recall someone saying they asked OWC which controller they were using for their OWC Mercury Extreme SSD drives and OWC's response was that they didn't know....
willscary - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Originally, I was told by Customer Service that he "did not know", but after pressing for an answer and a breif period on hold, he returned and told me that all current and future Mercury Extreme SSDs would utilize the Sandforce 1200 controller.I was very angry at this "bait and switch" and returned my SSDs. Actually, they were in transit and I had OWC recall them. I have not yet received credit for them although they returned to OWC early Tuesday morning.
I will also say that OWC did send confirmation of the returns and said that the credit would be processed by the end of the week, so all is not bad.
I was asked "what the big deal was" on another thread. The way I see it, it would be like ordering an expensive sports car with a V6 and having it arrive with a turbocharged 4 cylinder. The performance may be the same, but there would then be the possibility of added maintenance costs, lesser reliability and a shorter lifespan. Add to that that the dealer would tell me that even though the smaller turbo option was $1,000 less than the V6, I should pay the same because performance really would be nearly identical.
Just my thoughts.
DanNeely - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
15k IOPs is higher than the SF1200 supports with a normal firmware. More likely I think would be something similar to intels 40GB drive where only half the controllers flash chip ports are filled and a full speed SF controller.poeticjustic - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
That was a really helpful and thorough article. Thank you for all this info.a few things that i wanted to ask.
-On the random read/write speed page and specifically on the 4k aligned random write, we don't see anywhere the intel x25-E performance. Obviously that is because the testing of the x25-E was performed in the past, when this kind of test wasn't performed. Is it safe to assume that the performance of the x25-E would be quite close to that of the 4k random write test (around 48MB/s)?? Since we see that mostly the new controllers are mostly affected.
-Furthermore, at least from what i've seen on eshops around in my country, the price of the z-drive m84 250GB and 500Gb has come closer to that of sata ssds. Still they are more expensive of course, but wouldn't it be a good idea to start seeing some z-drive performance on those tables for a direct comparison with the ssds and see whether the difference in their performance is bigger than the difference in their price? Just a thought.
Making an extra remark on the performance of SF controller during already compressed data plus the the random data perormance table was a pretty important addition and something we should pay attention to.
Thank you once again for a well built article.
eaw999 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
correct, the x25-e, like -m, isn't affected drastically by alignment. you can expect slightly higher numbers with alignment, but nothing jaw-dropping. on the other hand, the x25-e positively rips at random writes at high queue depths, but that's not something you're likely to see often in desktop usage.krazyderek - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
When does this ever happen? isn't that sentence an oxymorron, the only thing i can think of it if you were installing several applications at the same time? and it would depend on the applications being installed too, since i think i remember hearing that games are very sequential nowkrazyderek - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I DO see the importance when dealing with pre-compressed files like pictures and videos, i agree it would be nice to see a 0% 50% and 100% compressed figures to give people a good overview of things, but still, when would you see highly random sequential data?zdzichu - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Sequentially speaks about data access pattern, highly random is about data itself. It is perfect description of writing movie to a disk - you are storing byte-by-byte and each byte is probably different that preceeding ones.zdzichu - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I think you can skip non-aligned test in future. It is a corner case, not interesting at all.PubicTheHare - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I'm pretty sure we're still 18-24 months away from having SSDs priced at a level that the average SSD-seeker is willing to spend.There will probably be an attractive price differential between what is available now and what price level the same will be available for in 12 months, but I really think it'll take a bit over a year to start seeing "attractive" pricing.
None of this stuff matters to me until Apple supports TRIM or garbage collection (I believe this is "OS-agnostic" TRIM, right?) comes to the drives with the best firmware and price/usable GB.
I just want a 256-300 GB SSD that I can leave 15% unpartitioned and throw into a MBP. I want it to scream.