OCZ Agility

[The Halk]

There's bits and pieces of news appearing on the net about it, and some of it is wrong. So I thought I'd post up what's known about the drive.

It comes in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB flavours.

Performance for sequential and IOPS/random speeds is roughly 70% of Vertex.

It's made with slower NAND and has an Indilinx controller.

Up until now the Indilinx(OCZ and SuperTalent), new Samsung, and Intel drives are pretty much the only drives that offer performance in all areas that match or exceed the fastest SATA mechanical drives. Other SSD drives are faster or as fast in most aspects, but can fall down badly on random reads/writes. The result is that for us consumers we have to buy a very high performance drive, at a high price... because there's no middle ground.

The Agility closes that middle ground. It will yield exceptional performance at a more affordable price. At 70% of the speed you would not notice the difference in real use between a Vertex and an Agility, unless you were doing the same task over and over, or you benched it.

I don't know what the retail price will be. It will of course be cheaper than the Vertex.

I don't know when retail will be, samples will apparently be arriving very soon. So at a guess I'd say in roughly a month.

It will support OCZ Wiper out of the box, so performance will last on it.

Some FUD that's appeared is that it's an internal RAID SSD. It isn't.

If I was offered the choice between the Vertex and the Agility, I'd personally opt for the Agility to save a few quid. I have the Vertex drives, since they were available at the time I bought...

 

[FaceplantSi]

Good overview there The Halk, thankyou for collating that.

I'd certainly be interested in these for laptop drives since they are reportedly going to be a bit cheaper than the Vertex's and although they are slower they will still of course benefit from OCZ's excellent support and service.

 

[The Halk]

I've had one Vertex, then a second in RAID0. And now because of "dirty cells" I benchmark a little over 50% performance. I can't really tell the difference, so I think the Agility sounds pretty good.

 

[FaceplantSi]

I know what you mean - I have had benchmarks start to slow too, but that was after a month or so of Vista64 usage and I didn't bother with Wiper as I was about to be reloading to Win7 anyway - but although benchies showed some drop in numbers I couldn't see the difference on screen - and besides, I rarely bench now except when someone else asks for a test as I prefer to enjoy using the rig to testing it!

 

[leexgx]

due to the access times of SSD, most of the times its not the Speed that the data is transfered at thats why i think not much point in raiding up SSDs more so if its samsung vertex or falcon, as they have 200MB/s read speeds, most games do not benefit from raid due SSDs access times eveyr thing is accessed strate away COD4 the map load bar justs moves from one side to the other not stuttering or pauses and does it fast considering i only have an corsair s128 tis data rates are reported around the same speed of an HDD but access times is what beats it on the SSD

 

[FaceplantSi]

due to the access times of SSD, most of the times its not the Speed that the data is transfered at thats why i think not much point in raiding up SSDs more so if its samsung vertex or falcon, as they have 200MB/s read speeds, most games do not benefit from raid due SSDs access times eveyr thing is accessed strate away COD4 the map load bar justs moves from one side to the other not stuttering or pauses and does it fast considering i only have an corsair s128 tis data rates are reported around the same speed of an HDD but access times is what beats it on the SSD

Jeez, don't you think we've heard this little gem enough already? No offence intended here but this 'access times not data rate' rant is getting just a tad boring - just accept that there are others who disagree, both users and well respected reviewers alike.

I have a raid array of SSD's and I say I can see a difference between what I have and a single SSD - and yes, I have tried them both. You clearly have not.

And you are of course right, transfer speed doesn't matter at all - that's why we're all still using IDE drives attached to ISA expansion cards!

 

[The Halk]

due to the access times of SSD, most of the times its not the Speed that the data is transfered at thats why i think not much point in raiding up SSDs more so if its samsung vertex or falcon, as they have 200MB/s read speeds, most games do not benefit from raid due SSDs access times eveyr thing is accessed strate away COD4 the map load bar justs moves from one side to the other not stuttering or pauses and does it fast considering i only have an corsair s128 tis data rates are reported around the same speed of an HDD but access times is what beats it on the SSD

The access times as well as sequential data transfer rates decline, and are restored by wiper.

 

[GOB14]

Hi

Is it defo called the agility as iv seen a new ocz drive over here(moved t oz) thats called the summit which is about $60 cheaper than the vertex but unsure if it would be the sensible choice or do i wait a little longer.Never seems to be the ideal time t take the plunge with rumours of price cuts and new drives just around the corner.Would post a link to it but unsure if forum rules prevent this

 

[FaceplantSi]

Never seems to be the ideal time t take the plunge with rumours of price cuts and new drives just around the corner.Would post a link to it but unsure if forum rules prevent this

And that's the trouble with this level of tech - it never is the right time to buy into it, but tbh if you wait then yes prices will come down, but how long are you prepared to go on like that for? I would say that if you can afford it then get it now and enjoy the benefits.

As far as linking to other sites goes then I would think that if it's another e-shop selling the same kinda gear that OcUK do then that wouldn't be allowed, but if a manufacturer then probably yes it's ok. Some review/forum sites are also disallowed as they are part of other etailers.

 

[The Halk]

Hi

Is it defo called the agility as iv seen a new ocz drive over here(moved t oz) thats called the summit which is about $60 cheaper than the vertex but unsure if it would be the sensible choice or do i wait a little longer.Never seems to be the ideal time t take the plunge with rumours of price cuts and new drives just around the corner.Would post a link to it but unsure if forum rules prevent this

There's 3 OCZ drives that have been talked about. The Summit is a Samsung rebadge with custom firmware that's due out soon. The Agility is an Indilinx with lower cost NAND. The Collosus is a concept drive that they made which is essentially two Vertex in internal RAID.

 

[GOB14]

Found some info on the ocz site,dont know a lot about the ins n outs of the specs but close too vertex but has more onboard cache,So many t choose from
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_summit_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

 

[D D Danneh]

And you are of course right, transfer speed doesn't matter at all - that's why we're all still using IDE drives attached to ISA expansion cards!

Of course transfer speed matters, but it's not the be-all and end-all. If you want to grab a 2KB file, on an HDD, no matter how fast it's transfer rates are, it'll still take at least 10ms due to access times. On an SSD, no matter how fast transfer rates are, it'll grab it in 0.1ms. Fast transfer rates benefit you when opening large files, and fast access times benefit you when opening small files. With a combination of both, you get very snappy performance indeed. However, for OS usage (small files), an SSD with low transfer rates will cope just fine.

 

[The Halk]

That's true Danneh. But up until this point there's no drives with low transfer rates and high IOPS. JMicrons had the high transfer rates. Indilinx/Intel/New Samsung have both high transfer rates and high IOPS.

 

[miniyazz]

The old Samsung/old Corsair (S128) have high IOPS (not as high as Vertex, but far higher than HDDs) with relatively slow transfer rates (90MB/s ish) - they have sufficiently high transfer rates for stonking OS performance, when coupled with the IOPS. So they're not as fast as the Vertexes but they're still excellent drives.

 

[Arcane]

OCZ Launches Agility Series; Cheapest SSDs Using Indilinx Controller

The new Agility series capitalizes on OCZ's success and experience with the Barefoot controller, pairing it with cheaper, slower performing NAND flash. The 120GB and 60GB models have a maximum read speed of 230MB/s and a maximum write speed of only 135MB/s. Sustained writes are also slower at 80MB/s, but random write speeds should be in the range of Vertex drives. All editions will come with a 64MB DRAM cache, identical to that of the Vertex series.

Link

 

[FaceplantSi]

Already linked to here.

 

[Ninja Please!]

all on backorder too! found it priced at 146USD for 30gb model.

 

[Stonedofmoo]

Sounds like they should now bin their Core/Solid and Apex SSD's. They're all superseeded.

 

[martos]

In real world usage (OS etc), what sort of performance gain do the Vertexes give over the Corsairs (or the £95 samsungs)

 

[miniyazz]

Depends what you're doing with the OS.. if accessing large files, the Vertexes will be much faster. For general opening programs/booting, mostly lots of small files, Vertexes will be faster. But the Corsair/Samsung will be far faster than a normal HDD.
It's hard to quantify how much faster without having the drives to hand, each with an identical OS installation and hardware, and opening stuff with a stopwatch. Without resorting to benchmarks, that is, which obviously wouldn't be real world usage.