Final Thoughts
Just like in the case of previous versions, the Agility 3 is the little brother to the Vertex 3. While both drives use the same controller the Agility 3 uses “cheaper” 25nm NAND chips. This chips are less expensive to produce and are not as powerful as the ones that are in the Vertex 3.
In any case even with the “cheaper” NAND chips the Agility 3 is one of the fastest solid state drives available and the speeds compared to previous versions are just staggering. In ATTO we received scores of 555MB/s read and 514MB/s write! Using Sandra’s Physical Disk Benchmark we received scores of 467MB/s read and 494MB/s write. These scores are some of the best we have received from a solid state drive and really show the power of this product.
This is a SandForce-based drive so you do get the added features that the new SandForce SF-2200 controller offers. The drive will do real-time loss-less compression. This is why there is no need for a cache chip, but also means less writes to the data cells. RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) is a term we have heard a lot with these new drives. So on top of ECC for data protection RAISE adds another level of security. This drive also supports TRIM as almost all solid state drives do these days.
The Agility 3 is available in 60GB, 120GB and 240GB versions. The 240GB version that we reviewed sells for $474.99 at my favorite online retailer, compared to the $539 of the Vertex 3 240GB. Overall ThinkComputers give the OCZ Agility 3 240GB Solid State Drive a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Great performance
– Price compared to the Vertex 3
– 3 year warranty
Cons:
– None that I found
