OCZ Agility EX 60GB SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read

What is truly remarkable is not the sequential or 512k results but that amazing 4k result. Those numbers are down right scary good. Overall, in small 4k reads and sequential reads this drive lands firmly in first place. When it comes to the mid size 512k test the numbers place it in third, which is very good considering this "mid tier" drive is up against flagship performance models.

Write

As with the reads, the write performance in the 512k and sequential tests are extremely good, but once again the real standout is the small file write speed. It’s a solid second place and is darn near triple the speed of the other Indilinx’s in this test. Making this even more impressive is the fact that usually 60GB versions of Indilinx drives are not as fast as their larger brethren, so once again we really have to wonder how powerful a 120GB version of this beast would be. All we can say is we are very impressed with this little guy.

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest.txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


Just when we thought we couldn’t get any more impressed with this drive it goes and surprises us again. Even though the Agility EX uses the exact same controller as all the other Indilinx SSD’s we have reviewed, it beats them by a full .01ms (or 10%). Remember this guy is “only” OCZ’s mid-tier drive and thus has “slower” Single Layer Cells than the Vertex EX. If this is “slow” sign us up because slow never looked so good.