OCZ Agility 3 180 GB and 360 GB Models Unveiled

[btarunr]

While Vertex 3 is OCZ's flagship SATA 6 Gb/s SSD based on the SandForce SF-2281 processor, Agility 3 is its performance-mainstream variant that uses the same SF-2281, but with async NAND flash memory. Reviews have found the drive to offer high price-performance. OCZ has traditionally kept Agility 3 reserved for lower capacities, reserving higher capacities for its other product families., however two new variants hit the radar in the Japanese markets today, the 180 GB (AGT3-25SAT3-180G), which is not even listed on OCZ's global site, and a 360 GB variant (AGT3-25SAT3-360G).

The 180 GB variant offers sequential speeds of up to 525 MB/s read, and 500 MB/s write, with 35,000 IOPS 4K random write performance; while the 360 GB variant offers sequential speeds of 525 MB/s read, 495 MB/s write, and 35,000 IOPS 4K random write performance. Like all other drives in the Agility 3 series, the two are built in the 2.5-inch form-factor, with SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The Agility 3 180 GB is priced at 19,000 JPY (US $256), and the 360 GB variant at 36,000 JPY (US $447).



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[Deadlyraver]

That is a great price!

 

[Completely Bonkers]

And thankfully (in my opinion) WITH overprovisioning rather than without http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=161285

 

[Athlon2K15]

Agility 3 is its performance-mainstream variant that uses the same SF-2281, but with async NAND flash memory. Reviews have found the drive to offer high price-performance.

This is wrong for one reason. You cannot say high performance and Asynchronous NAND flash in the same sentence. You could say something like when the drive is empty it is found to have high performance,but as soon as data hits that drive it is crippled

 

[radarblade]

Lets hope the SF-2281 doesn't have a failure rate like the rest of the SSD's on the market. Install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and on the second boot it goes :boom:

 

[The Von Matrices]

This is wrong for one reason. You cannot say high performance and Asynchronous NAND flash in the same sentence. You could say something like when the drive is empty it is found to have high performance,but as soon as data hits that drive it is crippled

Before you call it a "crippled" drive, look at its performance relative to drives with synchronous NAND. Since the SandForce drives compress data, they write less to the NAND, and the performance difference between SF drives with synchronous and asynchronous NAND is really only significant with completely incompressible data. For non-SF drives, asynchronous NAND really hampers performance due to their controllers' inherent high write amplification, but with SF's compression and low write amplification, I disagree with your judgment.

I bought an Agility 3 240GB a few weeks ago (for the low price of $239.99) and, while I don't notice that much of a "boost" in system performance compared to my VelociRaptor, I think it is not because the SSD is slow by any means but because Windows caching is so good and because I am comparing it to one of the highest performing hard drives. For someone upgrading from a slow 7200RPM OS drive, the difference between asynchronous NAND SSD and synchronous NAND SSD is negligible.

 

[The Von Matrices]

How are they distributing the NAND across the channels? It doesn't seem like it could be done symmetrically since SF drives have 8 channels.