OCZ Agility EX 60GB SSD Review

TRIM, & Firmware

For anyone wondering if the wiper.exe program works on SLC Indilinx’s drive like the Agility EX, the short answer is yes. The wiper program is not concerned about what kind of storage is being used since it sends the commands to the Barefoot controller and lets it deal with how to go about carrying out the commands. The easy way to think of this is like diesel and gasoline cars. Both have accelerators and all you have to do is push the pedal to make your car go. You don’t care how it does what it does, just that you get from point A to B.


However, the wiper.exe has just become a foot note for most users. This drive shipped with the latest and greatest firmware: 1.3. On the surface this looks like it’s a pre 1.4 firmware and thus has no Native OS TRIM abilities (ATA8 ACS2 TRIM) but looks can be misleading as the OCZ SLC versions of the Indilinx SSDs came out after the MLCs and thus are further ahead on the firmware curve. What this means is that 1.2 on an EX model is 1.3 on the standard MLC versions and more importantly, SLC firmware version 1.3 is the same as 1.4 on MLC based drives. This means that this drive supports TRIM right out of the box. With the advent of TRIM there is no need to run the wiper program. (EDIT: OCZ in a fit of wisdom has changed the naming scheme for the EX drives to avoid confusion. e.g. 1.3.1 is now called 1.4.1. IF you are running 1.3 / 1.3.1 there is no need to "update" to 1.4 / 1.4.1)

In an interesting move, Indilinx removed the more aggressive second generation NAND Launderer / Idle Time Garbage Collection from the new TRIM capable firmware BUT if you are like many and prefer it to TRIM (as it is supposedly faster but harder on the cells) they ALSO released firmware 1.3.1 / 1.4.1. You can easily switch between 1.4 and 1.41 with no ill effects as it is a non destructive firmware update. This is very good news, and does add an extra level of flexibility as not everyone will be using these drives with an OS that can issue TRIM commands (and even if you are you can try out both versions to see which one suits your needs better). In a nut shell, for all you die hard XP users who will not be upgrading to Windows 7 right away, 1.41.is the firmware you want to use. Bravo OCZ for meeting and beating our expectations.