OCZ Agility SATA 2.0 SSD 120GB

Examination:

The OCZ Agility SSDs are sized for 2.5" drive bys with dimensions of 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3 mm. The weight for the Agility drives is just 77 grams. The Agility offers 64MB of onboard cache, uses MLC flash memory, and its mean time between failures is rated for 1.5 million hours. The case for this SSD is actually made of metal rather than plastic like on most SSDs, which does add to the weight of the device, but can be more durable.

The 120GB Agility drive has read speeds up to 230MB/s, writes up to 135MB/s, and sustained writes up to 80MB/s. The 60GB Agility has the same read and write speeds as the 120GB version where as the 30GB version only has read speeds up to 185MB/s, writes up to 100MB/s, and sustained writes up to 60MB/s.

System Setup:

For our Linux testing of this OCZ SSD we used an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz, an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 160GB Western Digital SATA 2.0 hard drive where the Linux OS was installed, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX graphics card. On the software side we were using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 9.10 with the Linux 2.6.31-rc3 kernel, GNOME 2.27.4, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, NVIDIA 185.18.14 display driver, GCC 4.4.0, and were using an EXT4 file-system throughout all of our testing.

We had re-tested the OCZ 64GB Vertex (with the v1.10 firmware) on the system and the 160GB FUJITSU MHZ2160B hard drive for comparison purposes. With EXT4 from the Linux 2.6.31 kernel we were using the default mount options and before the testing had commenced each drive was freshly formatted.

For our testing we had used the Phoronix Test Suite for managing all of our Linux benchmarking. The test profiles we used had included Parallel BZIP2 compression, Bork file encryption, SQLite, PostgreSQL pgbench, IOzone, Threaded I/O Tester, and PostMark.