OCZ's Agility 2 Reviewed: The First SF-1200 with MP Firmware
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 21, 2010 7:22 PM ESTOverall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
In real world performance the SandForce drives do very well. Crucial and SandForce based drives are the ones to beat. You're looking at around 5%+ performance improvement over Intel's X25-M series and even more compared to Indilinx.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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beginner99 - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
One thought:Wouldn't it be possible just tp use the vertex 2 "special" firmware for tis drive? I mean as far as i understood the controllers are 100% identical it is the firmware that makes the difference. Same should be true for any SF-1200 drive.
But i'm not gonna try it out myself. ;)
Moonstarr - Sunday, May 9, 2010 - link
Exactly what I was thinking. Take a look at the photos in the gallery and you'll see that the board revisions and controller are identical. Only the branding of the ram looks different.jordanl17 - Saturday, April 24, 2010 - link
Does anyone use these SSDs in a server? Image a 7 drive raid-5 array ?!?!? it would be great. (I'm talking about for a Terminal Server 2008 64bit. all new hardware)I'd like to buy either an HP or IBM blade setup and use 2 of these drives in raid-1 in each blade.
Does anyone know if this is possible? I know it wouldn't be as reliable as regular hard drive, but I'd keep a few on hand as backup.
charlielittle - Saturday, April 24, 2010 - link
I'm using a 128gb NOVA in a Dell D820 with WinXP. I'd like to keep its great performance up to snuff without doing a full wipe. I was wondering, would it be possible to plug it in as an extra drive on my Win7 desktop and run some utility to force TRIM commands for any/all unused blocks on the drive? Does it have to be the boot drive for TRIM to be enabled by Win7?Thanks,
--C
iwodo - Sunday, April 25, 2010 - link
While Sandforce was slower in Seq Read / Write with Random Data. Would the setting have any different on other non Sandforce SSD.pesos - Sunday, April 25, 2010 - link
it would be awesome if a SAS 15k drive could be thrown into these SSD benchmarks going forward for those of us interested in doing enterprise comparisons!remmelt - Monday, April 26, 2010 - link
The SSDnow V+ second generation doesn't perform all that well in the individual tests, but scores remarkably well in the overall performance graphs. Considering price per GB, this might be a great alternative.Can anyone explain the difference in the low scores on individual tasks and high scores in the overal benchmarks for this drive?
Squuiid - Monday, April 26, 2010 - link
Anand, excellent review as always, thanks very much.Any updates on your Crucial drive? Are you now confident recommending the drive? Has the new one they sent you been reliable and has the performance degradation now been fixed?
Sorry for the million questions.
brain42 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I notice that the latest drives have much higher random write performance than the random read performance, even though the typical scenario has more reads than writes.Could this be a symptom that the SSD industry is becoming so focused on random write, that the random read performance is forgotten? When all the reviewers focus solely on the random write performance, you can't really blame the industry for sacrificing performance in other areas.
fishak - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
remmelt, that is my question exactly. Why is the PC Mark score of the Intel G2 controller, so close to Sandforce, while the individual read and write scores of the Intel controller are so far behind?Per GB price of Intel is about $3.50, while Sandforce is about 4 bucks.