OCZ Agility EX Series SATA II 2.5" SSD

Conclusions

Shown within the results from all the tests are pretty astounding.  The correct components build around the OCZ  Agility has shown it to be a superb little workhorse which will compete with the best.  We therefore have to sit up and pay careful attention to what has been displayed today.  An SSD which has good read/write synthetic and real-time results that fall well within the quoted figures within the introduction.   An obvious point of note which many will pickup on is the lack of a back-up disc from our displayed build.  In response to this why, most corporate / SoHo / studios all backup directly to the server so there is no real requirement for additional hardware holding onto more system resources that can be eliminated and fed back into the mix.   If a local backup is needed, then most resort to the DVDRW or as more commandingly used now the flash USB drive.   But spindle drives are now huge and the costs have dropped dramatically, so what's in a few dollars more.   Therefore at todays rates for just under £2200 UKP, $3450 USD or last but not least €2500EUR we have on, or under the desk a quiet speed machine.   A figure today not to be ignored when one is looking for an expandable budget entry high-end unit.

Moving onwards to the results.  The synthetic tests certainly have shown the Agility SSD to perform with exceptional read/write scores matching in across the board from all.   Each portraying what the other has seen.  Therefore homework with the algorithms has been completed well.    The PCMark 2005 and Everest giving us those all important breakdowns of what to expect from a working system.  

Moving onwards to the professional tests, these are pretty remarkable to say the least.  Cinebench 10 kicking up a gear from our previous outing with this platform, though more importantly SolidWorks showing an overall I/O increase which we had hoped for.  Ultimately, within SPEC10 we see figures some only dream of reproducing.  Here they are the norm, showing the current ATI FirePro driver running flawlessly.  Analysis the I/O tests and once more the repeat of how much improvement the OCZ Agility has helped within the overall scoring with its very fast read/writes.

Maintaining OCZ's policy of keeping their clients up to date; the OCZ website forums have a huge amount of threads covering many differing topic's.   Most importantly the announcements of new improved firmware updates for their SSD's.   Our test unit arrived, we tested it "as is" out of the box and the results had been very good indeed.  Most surprised we had been.   On flashing the Agilities firmware up to the latest release of V1.5  we did notice a significant increase in performance across the board. Kudos to those hidden within the R & D team in maintaining updates of this significant value.   £2.16p per GB is not bad.   15 years ago this was the approximate price per GB of spindle drives.

The final analysis of the whole story has shown the OCZ Agility to be seriously considered as a rapid boot disc for a workstation in both OS and for the systems applications.  But does it stop here, could this be an SSD found as the boot disc in many a server now.   Time once more will tell.   The costing's are now good and show an exceedingly good price performance ratio.  What you have read today must have many reader second guessing - just could this be the route ahead we should be taking.   In our opinion yes it does and serious final considerations now have to be taken in our choices of how we move forward when planning out system builds.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Agility Pictures
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Software Used
Page 4 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010
Page 5 - Everest Ultimate Ver. 5.03
Page 6 - Miscellaneous Hard Disc Benchmarks
Page 7 - Professional Benchmarks
Page 8 - Conclusions and Award