Conclusion

The Agility as well as the Agility 3 were very good drives that delivered almost the performance of a Vertex drive for less money, which made them interesting from a price/performance perspective. As our tests show the Agility 3 has some trouble delivering consistent performance. The worst case in our benchmark parcours showed a sequential write throughput of only 108 MByte/s. The main difference between a Vertex 3 and an Agility 3 is, that the more expensive Vertex 3 uses synchronous NAND Falsh and its smaller brother only got asynchronous NAND Flash. If we furhter look at the performance values we see that sequential writing in general isn't what the Agility 3 is best at. With 391 MByte/s as a peak it is quite far from the Vertex 3. Shifting the focus to the random results finally shows some more consistency. When performing random read operations the drive is capable of delivering 469 MByte/s which is almost what the manufacturer claims. A look a the random read number reveals that the Agility is finally able to break through the 500 MByte/s wall and show a avery good 516 MByte/s.
This leaves us with the IOPS results. Writing 4 KByte blocks randomly results in a very good value of 60'500 operations per second. When the drive has to read 4 KByte blocks in random order we measured 35'000 IOPS.

The Agility 3 definitely is a quick drive. But unfortunately if you start integrating the price into the equation you might ask yourself wheter the Vertex 3 wouldn't be a better choice or not. To us it would make much more sense to spend a bit more on a Vertex 3 and in return you'll get a drive which really is able to unleash the full potential of the very powerful SandForce SF-2281 SSD processor. [en][/fr]

[en]When this review was published the Agility 3 could've been bought for the following prices at Brack Electronics AG.:

• OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB: CHF 159.- (ca. EUR 122.-)
• OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB: CHF 259.- (ca. EUR 199.-)
• OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB: CHF 539.- (ca. EUR 415.-)