OCZ Agility 3 (240GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 24, 2011 2:53 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2010
To keep things consistent we've also included our older Storage Bench. Note that the old storage test system doesn't have a SATA 6Gbps controller, so we only have one result for the 6Gbps drives.
The first in our benchmark suite is a light/typical usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
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Nicolas Pillot - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Seeing Vertex 2 120G and Agility 3 120G at the same price, which one should i buy ?BTW : no sata 3 motherboard at the moment, so choice shouldn't be based on it.
DanaG - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
I sure hope the Agility/Vertex 3 drives are more reliable than the Vertex 2 is. I had one fail two weeks ago, and then the replacement I got last Wednesday failed on Saturday. I believe it happened when we had a momentary interruption in power. The laptop and secondary-bay HDD are fine, and the drive kept working until I shut it down; once I did so, the drive became totally unresponsive.The drives also can't handle ATA Password properly:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
From the forums and Newegg's reviews, it looks like plenty of other people have similar issues. For comparison, I've had zero issues with my old Indilinx drive. I like the performance of the Vertex 2, but I don't feel confident in the reliability of any Sandforce drives now.
Anand, can you please talk to the OCZ people about these sorts of things?
cactusjuggler - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
Firstly, I really appreciate AT's in depth reviews. That said, I absolutely agree with DanaG, and I don't see reviews addressing the reliability of these drives--particularly SandForce ones.I'm pricing out two new computers at the moment, and have been surveying the SSD landscape. If I made a buying decision purely on this review and others that focus on performance I'd already have ordered a Vertex 2 or the like, but after reading enough about failed drives, there's no way I'm buying anything with a SandForce controller for a good long time.
Based on the sheer number of anecdotes I'm seeing I find it odd that reviews aren't even mentioning the issue of reliability. 6 out of 10 of the most recent comments on Newegg for the OCZ Agility 2 are complaining about outright failure (in some cases replaced drives also failed), or major problems using the drive.
That sort of track record is embarrassing in a retail product, and really makes me wary about the reliability of the technology overall. Compounded with the apparent fact that data on a bricked drive is irretrievable in many (the majority?) of cases, and you really have to think twice about using one.
Given all this it's kind of amazing, and downright laughable, that some of these drives are supposedly targeted at enterprise level customers.
rajeanand - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link
For all those looking for a Corsair Force 3 review, the first on is now online: http://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/zardo...Seems performance is very similar to the Agility3 reviewed in this article, although the Force 3 reviewed in the article is a 120GB
curiousincal - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Can tell me the preconditioning for the random read test and the preconditioning for the random write test used here?Thanks,
johan008 - Thursday, January 26, 2012 - link
Mine died after 4 months. OCZ used "unauthorized reseller or warranty not transferable" to stop all the claims. I was problem ticket no: 240 526 and it keep rising fast. See OCZ discussion forum before you buy as these SSD from OCZ are still very unstable.jdtwoseven - Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - link
I've had three OCZ SSD products, including one of these Agility 3 240 gb SSDs, and I've ended up having to RMA each one of them. That is a terrible record of reliability for the drives. The amount of time that it took to get a replacement was also painfully slow. Not good. Buy a Crucial M4, which is what I did while I was waiting. The Crucial M4 is fast, and I've had no problems at all.ByronArneson - Friday, October 7, 2016 - link
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