Conclusion

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If we take a closer look at the performance, we see that the OCZ Agility 4 is definitely a quick drive. Especially the random IOPS are astonishingly high for a drive with asynchronous NAND Flash. In this regard we measured as near as makes no difference 64'000 IOPS for 4K random reads and a whopping 85'000 IOPS for 4K random writes. Looking at sequential throughput there seems to be an issue with the Agility 4 and our testing program iozone, because the drive was performing very poor for sequential reads. Because of this we added another page to this review, where we show you the results we got from running Atto. In this case the values were perfectly fine. There was 420 Megabyte per seconds for sequential reads and 410 Megabyte per second for sequential writes.

Compared to the Vertex 4, the Agility 4 makes use of asynchronous NAND Flash memory which you can clearly see when you look closer at the performance. Nevertheless, for a drive with asynchronous NAND Flash the random performance is impressive. It really seems that the Everest II controller can be greatly optimized for this purpose. But with the Agility 4 performance is only one side of the medal, the other side is the price. Using geizhals.at to compare prices we found that the Agility 4 256 Gigabyte goes for 169.90 Euros (est. CHF 204.-). If you calculate the price per gigabyte you get 0.66 Euro per gigabyte. If you then compare it to a Kingston V+200 which is targeted at the same audience you find that the 240 gigabyte version of this drive costs 186 Euros (est. CHF 223.-) or 0.775 Euro per Gigabyte. That said the Agility also comes with a ver good price/performance ratio.

If you should be looking for a quick SSD that comes with an excellent price per Gigabyte, then you should definitely look at the Agility 4 from OCZ.