OCZ Agility 2 120 GB SSD Review 9

OCZ Agility 2 120 GB SSD Review

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Value and Conclusion

  • OCZ's Agility 2 120 GB SSD can be found online for around $329.
  • Outstanding synthetic performance
  • Reasonable pricing for a SF-1200 drive
  • Includes 3.5" mounting adapter
  • Supports TRIM
  • Real-life performance not as impressive as synthetic
  • Price/performance lower than other non-Sandforce drives
OCZ's Agility 2 is an excellent choice when you are looking for a SandForce based SSD in any capacity range. OCZ offers their drive in sizes from 40 GB to 480 GB, which should cover every usage model and wallet size. The Agility 2 shows amazing results in our synthetic testing with well above 250 MB/s in both read and write. The high write speeds especially impress - many other SSDs are lacking here. However, overall our application benchmarks show only a 2% improvement over the previous-generation OCZ Agility. When switching from a traditional harddrive to SSD, you would see huge gains, but moving from an older generation SSD to something like the OCZ Agility 2 might not be able to justify the cost at the outset.
The SandForce SF-1200 packs the much talked-about TRIM feature supported by Windows 7, Windows Server Series 2008 R2, and the latest versions of the Linux kernel. The garbage-collecting capabilities of TRIM could become extremely important in the long run, as the drive begins to age. Unlike with magnetic storage devices such as hard drives, where new data can simply be overwritten on top of portions of the disks which are magnatised by data that is deleted, for NAND-flash based devices, for new data to take the place of deleted data, the portion of the flash chip must be physically erased, consuming some write cycles. TRIM makes sure that the drive knows immediately when blocks are freed after a file delete which give it a chance to wipe all portions of the flash chips "clean" when the drive is idling, so the cleaned areas are ready to receive new data, faster. Without TRIM, the drive would have to waste those write cycles whenever the OS seeks to write data, which happens to be occupied by deleted data, and that lowers write performance.
Overall, Agility 2 should be your first step to solid-state storage, not so much if you've already been using SSDs. TRIM and SF-1200's amazing write performance should still impress.
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Nov 23rd, 2024 17:24 EST change timezone

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