The 2011 Mid-Range SSD Roundup: 120GB Agility 3, Intel 510 and More Compared
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2011 12:52 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload
Our new light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric).
The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 27% | |||
| 16KB | 8% | |||
| 32KB | 6% | |||
| 64KB | 5% | |||
Despite the reduction in large IOs, over 60% of all operations are perfectly sequential. Average queue depth is a lighter 2.2029 IOs.
Under more typical desktop usage models the Vertex 3 is the fastest, but not by a huge margin. The Agility 3 and Intel SSD 510 are both within 10%. The major advantage for OCZ here is in read performance, which is what you do most of the time with a desktop (non-file archival) workload:
Write performance is clearly not one of the Vertex 3's strong points, at least compared to the 510 and Corsair P3 - both of which deliver top notch performance here. Despite using identical controllers, there is a tangible performance difference between these two drives.
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hybrid2d4x4 - Friday, June 10, 2011 - link
Slightly off topic question: in your review of the Agility 3, you guys mentioned that it's lower power characteristics are due to asynchronous NAND. Does the Agility 2 also use this?I want a SSD for a laptop I'm getting within the next 2 months and don't really care as much about performance, just power consumption and bang-for-buck.
tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Appears that Agility3 120GB << 240GB with incompressible data (which apparently is typical).Would we see yet another big performance drop for 60GB? Need to add this review so we can see what we lose.
Perhaps the value of SATA III drops precipitously with each halving of SSD capacity?
tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
This would be helpful to see see "real world performance" in ONE place. For example, Agility 3 60GB, 120GB, 240GB and Vertex 3 120GB, 240GB.tecsi - Monday, June 13, 2011 - link
Incompressible Read Speed: Vertex3 (497) 2.5 times faster than Agility 3 (203)? Is this correct? What accounts for this huge difference?erikejw - Friday, July 15, 2011 - link
Beware the Intel SSD 320 (and probably 510 too).Huge number of complete data losses for users.
Intel finally admits the problem exist.
To my knowledge noone has been able to retrieve any data.
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http://www.fudzilla.com/memory/item/23447-intel-co...
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"Intel is aware of the customer sightings on Intel SSD 320 Series. If you experience any issue with your Intel SSD, please contact your Intel representative or Intel customer support (via web: www.intel.com or phone: www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contact/phone) . We will provide an update when we have more information.
Alan
Intel's NVM Solutions Group"
datalaforge - Saturday, July 23, 2011 - link
Thanks for all of the great lineups here. I'm wondering what you guys think about the Samsung 470 SSD. Also why is the Seagate Momentus XT the only Hybrid drive that I can find out there. It seems like such a good idea. Why haven't any competitors given Hybrids a shot?Carlu - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link
A) Can some one explain to me the different in "8GB span" vs "100% span"?http://ark.intel.com/compare/56577,56576,56585,565...
B) And how do I compare them?
drumm_22 - Wednesday, June 6, 2012 - link
I have been reading several of the SSD articles on AnAnd and reading reviews on Newegg. I have recently purchased a Sager notebook to use during my college years as an engineering student. I was wondering if an SSD would be worth the money right now or should i wait for SSD's to become more adavanced at cheaper?