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
speden - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
I still don't understand if the SandForce compression increases the available storage space. Is that discussed in the article somewhere? Is the user storage capacity 93.1 GB if you write uncompressable data, but much larger if you are writing normal data? If so that would effectively lower the cost per gigabyte quite a bit.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
It does not increase the storage capacity of the drive. The OS still sees xxGB worth of data as being on the drive even if it's been compressed by the controller, which means something takes up the same amount of reported space regardless of compressibility.The intention of SandForce's compression abilities was not to get more data on to the drive, it was to improve performance by reading/writing less data, and to reduce wear & tear on the NAND as a result of the former.
If you want to squeeze more storage space out of your SSD, you would need to use transparent file system compression. This means the OS compresses things ahead of time and does smaller writes, but the cost is that the SF controller won't be able to compress much if anything, negating the benefits of having the controller do compression if this results in you putting more data on the drive.
arehaas - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
The Sandforce drives report the same space available to the user, even if there is less data written to the drive. Does it mean that Sandforce drives should last longer because there are fewer actual writes to the NAND? One would reach the 10 million (or whatever) writes with Sandforce later than with other drives.Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Exactly.MadMan007 - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
On a note somewhat related to another post here, I have a request. Could you guys please post final 'available to OS' capacity in *gibibytes*? (or if you must post gigabytes to go along with the marketers at the drive companies make it clear you are using GIGA and not GIBI) After I realized how much 'real available to OS' capacity can vary among drives which supposedly have the same capacity this would be very useful information...people need to know how much actual data they can fit on the drives and 'gibibytes available to the OS' is the best standard way to do that.vol7ron - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
Attach all corrections to this post.1st Paragraph: incredible -> incredibly
pattycake0147 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
On the second page, there is no link where the difference between the 1500 and the 1200 are referenced.Roland00 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
The problem with logarithmic scales is your brain interprets the data linerally instead of exponentially unless you force yourself not too.Per Hansson - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I agreeJust as an idea you could have the option to click the graph and get a bigger version, I guess it would be something like 600x3000 in size but would give another angle at the data
Because for 90% of your users I think a logramithic scale is very hard to comprehend :)
Impulses - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Not sure if this is the best place to post this but as I just remembered to do so, here goes... I have no issues whatsoever with your site re-design on my desktop, it's clean, it's pretty, looks fine to me.HOWEVER, it's pretty irritating on my netbook and on my phone... On the netbook the top edge of the page simply takes up too much space and leads to more scrolling than necessary on every single page. I'm talking about the banner ad, followed by the HUGE Anandtech logo (it's bigger than before isn't it), flanked by site navigation links, and followed by several more large bars for all the product categories. Even the font's big on those things... I don't get it, seems to take more space than necessary.
Those tabs or w/e on the previous design weren't as clean looking, but they were certainly more compact. At 1024x600 I can barely see the title of the article I'm on when I'm scrolled all the way up (or not at all if I've enlarged text size a notch or two). It's not really that big a deal, but it just seems like there's a ton of wasted space around the site navigation links and the logo. /shrug
Now on to the second issue, on my phone while using Opera Mini I'm experiencing some EXTREME slowdowns when navigating your page... This is a much bigger deal, it's basically useless... Can't even scroll properly. I've no idea what's wrong, since Opera Mini doesn't even load ads or anything like that, but it wasn't happening a week or two ago either so it's not because of the site re-design itself...
It's something that has NEVER happened to me on any other site tho, they may load slow initially, but after it's open I've never had a site scrolls slowly or behave sluggishly within Opera Mini like Anandtech is doing right now... Could it be a rogue ad or something?
I load the full-version of all pages on Opera Mini all the time w/o issue, but is there a mobile version of Anandtech that might be better suited for my phone/browser combination in the meantime?