OCZ Agility 3 Drive

D

Dethman

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 4, 2005
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Hey guys, I just picked up an OCZ Agility 3 drive, and its my first SSD. I have it plugged into SATA 3, and installed Win7 on it.

2 Questions:

Are these the types of results I should expect

What are some good tools for my SSD to monitor the health..status..etc...

Thanks

captureuqw.jpg
 
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Ummm... I would say run either crystal disk mark or AS-SSD. I'm not a big fan of HD tune, but it's really hard to screw up a SSD installation. I assume you're using SB Sata III ports as well.

Basically, an Agility 3 will pull down ~500MBs max sequentials, but only with 0 fill utilites. That's why I don't really like them. In the real world, most stuff is compressible but not like a bunch of zeros is compressible. With CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD you can see what average performance is like uncompressed. If you're using a SandForce drive as your first SSD and you see those incompressible performance numbers for the first time you might think something is wrong. It's not, but there're quite a bit lower, especially with asynchronous NAND equipped models. See Anandtech's http://www.anandtech.com/show/4421/the-2011-midrange-ssd-roundup for more information on why that is.

The highest incompressible read speed (sequentially) will be about 200MBs. The highest seq. write will be close to 140MBs. So I'm not sure whether HD Tune is using 00fill or random data (which is incompressible) but that probably explains your numbers. Luckily, most stuff is compressible to one degree or another (except for stuff that's already been compressed like MP3, JPEGs, ZIP files). In actual day to day use you'll mostly not notice the difference between the Agility and the Vertex 3. And if I did notice, I'd just remind myself how much money I saved by getting the Agility 3 instead of something much more expensive.

If you really want a utility to monitor your SSD, consider SSDlife. I use it for various purposes, but it's not a necessity. It can help you understand if you're writing a whole lot to a drive every day. Really, anything under 20GB a day is nothing, but it's good to get a feel for it. If I'm reading your picture correctly, you wrote almost 40GB of junk data to the drive to generate that benchmark. You might not want to do that constantly, but it's good to use your first SSD and understand the metrics involved. You can read all about SSDs, but you won't really appreciate them until you use one -- nor will you really understand which side is up. That's the fun part though.
 
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ckryan, that was a perfect answer to my question, I think your right about the speeds. I would say I sill have a very noticeable decrease in load times for several tasks on startup and in general... over just the standard hdd i had.
 
Hope I could help.

If you're OCD, I recommend not running benchmarks too often. Its good to understand what's going on, but don't let it ruin your experience.

For the money, the Agility 3 is the best value on the market (well, the Corsair Force 3 is the same thing bascially). I say enjoy it.
 
Most of the massive number of small files that make up Windows are very compressible. If you're copying a huge video to the drive, it won't be as fast since the video file is already compressed (and thus can't really be compressed further, so no speed increase). If I were to sneak in your house and switch in a Vertex 3, you'd never notice the speed increase. If I were to switch out a Vertex 3 with an Agility 3, no one would notice the slight decrease in speed.

I went with a Toggle NAND equipped model, but that's because I got a really good deal on it. The best SSD is the one you can afford. So don't let the incompressible benchmarks get you down. That's all I'm trying to say. I look at 100% compressible numbers, then 0% compressible numbers, then figure it will end up somewhere in between. Notable, OCZ's high end Revo drives (the new ones) use the same NAND as the Agility 3. If you ever decide it's not fast enough, get another one for cheap and RAID them.

I wish I could go back in time and experience my first SSD again -- it was an Agility too (a first gen Indilinx model). I've bought 12 drives since, and I'd rather have the slowest one of those than the fastest HDD.
 
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