OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD Review

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Vista Start Up / Adobe CS5 Load Time

Vista Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

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While not exactly over-brimming with awe inspiring boot performance, the Agility 3 240GB drive is still 6 seconds faster than a last generation high performance drive. However, it does struggle against competing drives, especially when compared against a similarly priced Crucial M4 256GB.

Adobe CS5 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible.

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Once again, the Agility 3 240GB may not be the fastest SSD we have looked at, but it still offers a lot more than enough performance for people who want a higher capacity drive. By the same token, even more performance is now readily available from the Agility 3’s competition.

 

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Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy (set to 1 file depth) and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.

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SATA 2 Performance

SATA 2 Performance

In a perfect world everyone investing in a new solid state drive would have access to a SATA 6Gb/s controller which could pass on the TRIM command. In reality not everyone has this and for many the decision comes down either giving up TRIM – never a good idea with most controllers – and running it off a secondary controller; or taking a performance hit and running in SATA 2.0 mode.

These tests will consist of some of our real world and synthetic benchmarks run on our standard 1155 test-bed; but the drive will be attached to an SATA 2 port.

For synthetic we have opted for the newcomer to our charts: Anvil Storage Utilities Pro. For real world we have opted for our Adobe test. These two tests should give you a very good idea of the level of performance impact you can expect from running a modern SATA 6 drive in compatibility mode.

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Unfortunately, the Agility 3 truly lives and dies by its SATA 6 Gbps compatibility, particularly when it comes to read performance and real world boot times. While certain allowances have to be made, the Agility 3 240GB does sport a steep cost and it really isn't an optimal choice for a non-SATA 6 environment. It should also be mentioned that in some cases the Agility 3's SATA 6Gbps numbers struggled to compete against against other drives' when they're in SATA 2 mode.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

Let’s begin this conclusion by saying that ONFI 1 drives were never meant to compete head to head against the best this market has to offer. OCZ’s Agility 3 caters to people who want the capacity they’re used to from a hard drive while retaining the bragging rights that come with SSD technology. Unfortunately, combining a large amount of space into a budget friendly (albeit still $390) SSD means that sacrifices will be made somewhere along the line.

We’d love to say that the OCZ Agility 3 240GB surprised us in some way but its numbers were pretty much in line with expectations. When dealing with highly compressible data, we saw some stellar results but when some more basic information was passed to the drive, performance fell flat. Certain benchmarks showed that some data Read situations caused the Agility to stumble and that manifested itself somewhat negatively in program boot times as well.

For all intents and purposes, in most benchmarks the Agility 3 competed well against drives almost every other SF2281-based drive in our charts. It consistently bested lower capacity ONFI 1 equipped SSDs and almost hit enthusiast level performance in some cherry picked benchmarks. OCZ’s customer support also needs special mention since it really is a cut above and will definitely come in handy if you run into any of the SF2281’s well documented issues.

Performance is only the tip of the iceberg here though. In such a competitive market, budget friendly high capacity drives need a combination of storage space, performance and price to stand but this is where the Agility 3 runs into a roadblock. At $390 it trades blows with Crucial’s extremely popular and always improving Marvell-equipped M4 256GB. Not only does this competing SSD allow consumers to avoid the possible complications arising from the SF2281 but it also exhibits better real world performance.

While there is a lot to like about the Agility 3, current SSD pricing is just too volatile to give it an outright recommendation. But with the market in such constant upheaval, what is an expensive drive today could be tomorrow’s bargain so keep your eyes open and the Agility 3 240GB may become an excellent choice.