OCZ Agility 3 or Crucial M4

Justintime · 29 Mar 2012 at 18:28

Agility 3 or Vertex 3. I can personally say i've not seen a BSOD on ANY Agility 3 drive that was secure erased and redetected via the BIOS since FW 2.15, same goes for any shipping now which will likely be 2.15 straight from the box, likely if from OCUK or any retailer with decent sales. I'm talking a sample of about 50 personal build to order and about 40 at work in i5 2320 H67 rigs. A few months ago i'd be all over the M4 bandwagon but have regained some confidence in the OCZ and Corsair offerings.

dannyboy101 · 29 Mar 2012 at 19:20

Rusty0611 said:
M4

lamboman · 30 Mar 2012 at 08:22

Justintime said:
Agility 3 or Vertex 3. I can personally say i've not seen a BSOD on ANY Agility 3 drive that was secure erased and redetected via the BIOS since FW 2.15, same goes for any shipping now which will likely be 2.15 straight from the box, likely if from OCUK or any retailer with decent sales. I'm talking a sample of about 50 personal build to order and about 40 at work in i5 2320 H67 rigs. A few months ago i'd be all over the M4 bandwagon but have regained some confidence in the OCZ and Corsair offerings.

So you've regained so much confidence with OCZ that you will stop recommending the equally fast/faster drive that doesn't have any problems?

The Agility uses asynchronous NAND, and will have real problems with uncompressible data. The Vertex and m4 uses synchronous NAND.

The m4 reads are some of the fatest out there. It's a toss-up between the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, let alone the standard Vertex 3. Large sequential reads aren't as fast, but with 4K in particular, the m4 eats the Vertez 3 Max IOPS alive.

People seem to think that Sandforce are the end-all to SSD performance. It's nowhere near as simple as that.

kerrgreg · 30 Mar 2012 at 08:42

The 8 Agility 3's Ive purchased for or friends have all have been fine. Cant recommend them enough, no doubt the M4 is good but Cant help thinking is the difference in price something you will notice and gain from in usage/support/warranty

lamboman · 30 Mar 2012 at 09:23

kerrgreg said:
The 8 Agility 3's Ive purchased for or friends have all have been fine. Cant recommend them enough, no doubt the M4 is good but Cant help thinking is the difference in price something you will notice and gain from in usage/support/warranty

The Agility isn't a bad drive, it's just that you're paying less money for a lesser drive. Nothing wrong with that, but asynchronous NAND drives are not that much cheaper than their superior synchronous counterparts, so you might as well spend the extra cash.

The difference in price won't get you better warranty; the better company will do that for you, regardless of price

I'm not being an m4 fanboy by the way. There are other drives that are equally as good, the Samsung 830 being another, with similar performance. If you want Sandforce and will take advantage of the areas where Sandforce drives will benefit performance, by all means spend the extra money for the Intel 520; that'll give you the best of both worlds, or take the "risk" and buy the Vertex 3 or Max IOPS (the risk is far smaller now, the only reason I still recommend the m4 is because it is still, for most real-world scenarios, a superior drive).