OCZ Agility EX Series SSD Review
Test System and IOMeter
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 920 Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board Western Digital Raptor - OS OCZ Agility EX Series 60GB OCZ Vertex Series 120GB Corsair P256 Intel X25-M Gen 1 80GB Intel X25-M Gen 2 160GB |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Win Vista Ultimate SP2 Intel 9.1.0.1012 DirectX 10 NVIDIA ForceWare v182.50 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 ATTO ver 2.34 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra XII SP2 IOMeter CrystalDiskMark |
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.
Its surprising to see where the Agility EX stands in comparison to our reference drives. In this benchmark, it falls in the middle of the pack and is easily outpaced by both of the Intel SSDs in the group. Also, the average response time of the Agility EX trails every other drive in this comparison.
