OCZ Agility EX 60GB SSD

Examination:

The OCZ Agility EX looks just like the Agility SSD but with the obvious labeling differences. Unlike the Agility series, the EX version is only available in a 60GB capacity (actually, 64GB is the unformatted capacity) and its read performance is rated for 255MB/s, its write performance up to 195MB/s, and sustained writes up to 100MB/s. Again, there is 64MB of cache on this SSD (similar to the Agility series) but with SLC NAND storage compared to the MLC memory on the former Agility. The Agility EX firmware also supports TRIM, which has been supported by the Linux kernel going back to the 2.6.28 release.

Chances are you are already familiar with the technologies behind solid-state drives and their fundamentals from other Phoronix reviews or articles elsewhere, so we will continue with our area of focus, which is the Linux performance.

System Setup:

Our test system consisted of an Intel Core i7 870 processor running at 2.93GHz with Turbo Boost, an Intel DP55KG motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz system memory, and an ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. On the software side was a clean installation of Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64 spin) with its EXT4 file-system, Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, and GCC 4.4.1. Besides the 60GB Agility EX we compared the Linux disk performance to a 120GB Agility and 60GB OCZ Vertex. We also threw a Seagate 320GB Barracuda ST3320620AS HDD into the mix with its SATA 2.0 interface, 7200RPM spin rate, and 16MB of cache. All of the solid-state drives were running their latest firmware at the time of testing.

The tests we used to look at the Linux SSD performance was AIO-Stress, IOzone, Dbench, PostgreSQL, and Threaded I/O Tester. All testing was done through the Phoronix Test Suite. Let's see how the OCZ Agility EX performs.