The OCZ Agility 3 is based on
second-generation SandForce technology, and that's reflected not just in its
quoted read and write speeds but it's price. It's newer hardware than the Nova
2, but even though the RRP is higher, it can be picked up for a little less
without too much shopping around.
Some of that cheapness is reflected in the
drive's approach to its supporting hardware. You don't get a conversion bracket
with this drive, nor a SATA cable, nor a power cable, so there are some hidden
costs.
You could argue that it's because it's
intended to go in notebook PCs, but its power consumption is so high that it
becomes a poor choice for battery-powered operations too. In this case, it
really is a corner-cutting exercise.
The Agility 3 does have some things going
for it. It uses the same SandForce controller found in OCZ's much-praised
Vertex 3 SSD drives, and the use of asynchronous memory means that read speeds
are often almost as high as quoted (although the write speeds are substantially
less). Average read performance is an acceptable 180MB/S, while typical write
performance is poor (but acceptable) at 65MB/S.
If you find 60GB too small (it's barely big
enough to operate as a primary hard drive) there are larger models based on the
same hardware - 120GB, 240GB and even 480GB - and these have more channels
compared to the 60GB incarnation, making them much faster. Of course, those are
more expensive too.
Although the Agility 3 60GB is a SATA 6Gbps
drive, its reasonably poor speed means that you're unlikely to see any
substantial differences whether you're using the latest SATA interface or the
slightly older SATA II. The larger Agility 3 drives will show a difference, but
performance at the budget end is closer to first-generation SandForce drives -
the lesson being that you don't actually need to spend extra to get SATA 6Gbps
drives at this level.
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Details
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Price
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$104
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Capacity
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60GB
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Read speed
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525MB/S
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Write speed
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475MB/S
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Max power consumption
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2.7W
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Idle power consumption
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1.5W
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