OCZ Agility SSD performance review - Intro words, specs, pictures
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 20 Oct 2009

For all of you people out there that already own a SSD drive, or are thinking about buying one, I seriously suggest that you head down to OCZ's forum. A lot of users and OCZ people are really committed to writing all sorts of guides and news about SSD drives so - you'll end up with a huge bunch of very important information if you take a couple of minutes of your time.

The update process was really simple - just burn the ISO file (you can find the file here. Also, if you own Agility EX, Vertex or Vertex EX, there are updates for these drives there, too. Just make sure that you absolutely READ everything that our good old friend Tony wrote there because, as the case may be here, there are a couple of Agility drives out there that have a name string issue so - be careful. For example, some drives are identified as "OCZ AGILITY" and some as "OCZ-AGILITY". That's why there are hyphen and non-hyphen versions of the firmware so make sure that you check which one you have. The simplest way to do so is to use crystaldiskinfo (you can download it here).

Agility and Agility EX firmware revision 1.4 brings TRIM support to these drives, and the v1.41 brings GC (Garbage Collection) support that will surely be very useful to non-TRIM-OS users To make it a bit simpler, upcoming Windows 7 release supports TRIM so - make sure you use that one if you already have Windows 7. If you're a proud OS X or Linux user such as myself, the v1.41 will be better for you because these OS's don't support TRIM although they will, and soon.

Furthermore, I would strongly suggest that you read some of the FAQ's related to setting up the SSD's to work at their optimum. For Windows 7, this one is pretty good so, check it out here. From a performance point of view, most of these tips are really good, but being a system administrator in my spare time, I'm somewhat hesitant to recommend turning System restore off. It saved my day on numerous occasions so - make sure that you read everything in that article before making a decision what to do. There are a couple of other links with very useful info here, and here. A must-read for SSD fanatics.

Having in mind the fact that this is a pretty new product, I gotta say that I expected to see at least some problems but was "greeted" with exactly zero of them. Even the firmware update process went really smooth and I was kind of glad that I delayed this article by a couple of days because just as I was to publish it, I got an email saying that there's a new firmware (v1.41) for Agility. So, for this article, I just started with the firmware it was shipped with (v1.3), all the way through the next one (v1.4) to finally test it with the latest firmware (v1.41). Since all of these updates do bring a significant amount of new stuff to the drive, let's explain a couple of terms and take it from there.

Agility sits in the "Mainstream" segment of OCZ's SSD offerings and, judging from the info on the packaging, should get you a lot of bang for the buck. Rated at up to 230MB/s read and writes up to 135MB/s (sustained up to 80MB/s), it's nothing short of impressive - in general - how far have SSD's gone in one single year. Crazy numbers equals mainstream? Let's follow that logic and check out some basic terms and kick this baby into motion.

Of course, first - picture: