An agile little drive, or is it left behind?
A good, reliable primary drive should be something that every hardcore builder invests in - while traditional hard drives are great and cheap for storing movies and other surreptitious things you really want something fast for your Operating System, and ideally your games too. SSDs are finally getting to the point where it's not the biggest leap to consider getting one, and this OCZ Agility is OCZ's latest budget SSD that reckons it's got the speed you need and the space you want.
Well it definitely does have a decent amount of space, with 119GB free when formatted. This is plenty for an operating system and your favourite games, but not only is it nice and roomy, but it also has a very good average read speed of 219.7MB/s. That's not the fastest we've seen, but it is incredibly stable. Burst speeds were comparatively less impressive at 186.9MB/s, though write speeds got a great boost from the 64MB of cache and hit roughly 200MB/s when copying the Crysis install file. Even Program Files copied at an average write of 96.7MB/s, and it just felt faster than most other drives we've looked at.
Silence is the order of the day with an SSD, and this one manages that as well as only getting slightly warm under heavy load. As there have been many rumblings about SSD performance dropping by large chunks when the drive is full, we filled it to bursting (only 2MB left!) and re-ran the average read tests with a result of 202.0MB/s. This is a loss of only 17.4MB/s, so is hardly noticeable in the greater scheme of things.
While the Agility might not be as cheap as some of the competing offerings (such as G.Skill's drive that we're yet to look at), it does offer very good performance at a nice price.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012