OCZ Agility 4 (256GB) - Indilinx Goes Mainstream

Mainstream Indilinx

Earlier this year in July, we reviewed OCZ’s new high-end Vertex 4 drive. The new Vertex 4 drives are significantly different from its predecessors because OCZ made the jump from the very popular SandForce SF-2281 controller to the new Marvell 88SS9187 controller and rebranded it as their own Indilinx Everest 2 controller.

Traditionally, the Agility series has been OCZ’s SSDs for more budget-conscious users and this hasn’t changed. To differentiate the Agility 4 drives from the more upmarket Vertex 4 ones, OCZ has fitted the Agility 4 drives with cheaper and slower asynchronous NAND. The Vertex 4 has synchronous NAND and the difference is that synchronous NAND transmit data on both the rise and fall of the signal wave, which translates to higher raw data throughput and faster response times. That aside, the Agility 4 has a smaller amount of onboard DRAM cache. To be specific, it has 512MB of onboard DRAM for prefetching read requests - that’s half of what the Vertex 4 has.

Whether or not the aforementioned tweaks will greatly hamper performance, we shall see later, but for now, here’s a quick look at the OCZ Agility 4 drive.

Test Setup

The drives tested on our new storage testbed, has the following system specifications:

• Intel Core i5-2400 (3.1GHz)
• MSI Z68A-GD80 (Intel Z68 chipset)
• 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7

The list of SSDs tested are as follows:

• OCZ Agility 4 (256GB) (Firmware 1.5.2)
• OCZ Vertex 4 (256GB) (Firmware 1.5)
• Intel SSD 335 Series (240GB)
• Intel SSD 520 Series (240GB)
• Plextor M2S (256GB) (Firmware 1.09)
• Transcend SATA III SSD720 (256GB) (Firmware: 5.0.2)
• Crucial M4 SSD (240GB)
• Kingston HyperX SSD (240GB)

Although the previously reviewed Intel SSD 335 Series was billed as a “mainstream” SSD, it wasn’t really mainstream in terms of performance and price. Performance-wise, it was capable of mixing it up with the current crop of high-end SSDs; and price-wise, it was only a tad more affordable than the Intel SSD 520 Series and about as costly other enthusiast grade SSDs. Hopefully, the new OCZ Agility 4 will be more of a mainstream SSD for casual users. In our review, we'll be comparing how it fares against its sibling, the Vertex 4 and also the recently reviewed Intel SSD 335 Series along with the current crop of high-end SSDs such as the Intel SSD 520 Series and Transcend SSD720.

The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.6.4
• HD Tune Pro 4.6
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7
• PCMark Vantage
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)

AS SSD Results

AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using the SF-2281 controller cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of the strong advantages of this controller. Therefore this is a useful benchmark because drives that use the SF-2281 don't gain an upper hand.

Despite removing the advantages of the SandForce SF-2281 controller, the OCZ Agility 4 is clearly down on performance in comparison with the current crop of high-end enthusiast-grade SSDs, especially in terms of read performance. On a whole, the Agility 4 offered about 70% to 75% the performance of the Vertex 4. Even so, write performance is actually quite impressive as we can see on the sequential and 4K, 64 threads workloads, its write performance was on a par with the fastest SandForce drives. 

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results

CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data.

On CrystalDiskMark, the Agility 4 is clearly no match for its more illustrious Vertex 4 sibling. Compared to the Vertex 4, the Agility 4’s read performance was generally about 65% to 70% that of the Vertex 4, while write performance fared better at around 75% to 80%. Even though it was slower than the Vertex 4, the Agility 4’s write performance was arguably better than any of the SandForce drives, and this was apparent on the sequential, 512KB and 4KB, 64 threads workloads. 

HD Tune Pro 4.6 Results

The OCZ Agility 4’s performance on HD Tune Pro 4.6 was generally quite disappointing. Read performance was almost only half that of the Vertex 4, and less than half of that the quicker SandForce drives. The Agility 4 redeemed itself somewhat when it came to write performance where it was capable of going toe-to-toe with even the fastest SandForce drives. Finally, random read and write performance was very poor, which may be a firmware issue or a case of the drive simply not agreeing with this particular benchmark and workload.

PCMark 7 Results

PCMark 7 is the latest benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.

The OCZ Agility 4 achieved 2964 PCMarks, which is about 75% that of the Vertex 4’s 3942 PCMarks. Compared to the SandForce drives, the Agility 4’s score was only about 55% of what the quickest SandForce drives could manage. 

PCMark Vantage Results

PCMark Vantage might have been around for quite some time, but it is still a fairly accurate representation of how the drives might be used in real-world scenarios. We are focusing on the hard drive test suite which comprises of tasks such as loading of applications to media creation.

Like the Vertex 4, the OCZ Agility 4 failed to record an overall score because it failed to complete one of the workloads, which is Windows Media Centre. This is a problem that has occurred frequently with Marvell-based drives that we've tested (the Indilinx controller used in Agility 4 is also a Marvell based controller, but with Indilinx firmware), so it seems that the firmware on the Agility 4 has yet to rectify this anomaly. Even so, if we were to look at the performance on the individual workloads, we can see that the Agility 4’s performance was rather disappointing. It was slower than the Vertex 4, which, in turn, is slower than the SandForce drives.

Iometer Results (Part 1)

Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face.

On Iometer, we can see that the OCZ Agility 4 is clearly no match for the enthusiast-grade SSDs. Looking at the graphs, it is evident that the Agility 4’s IOPS is generally lower than the competition, especially on the 64k streaming reads and web server workloads. 

Iometer Results (Part 2)

Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. Bearing in mind the Agility 4’s lower than average IOPS, it wasn’t surprising to see that it recorded higher than average response times too. This is no doubt due to its use of slower asynchronous NAND memory. 

Less Than Expected Performance, Wrong Price

With the Vertex 4, OCZ introduced to the world their Indilinx Everest 2 controller. While their new controller may be based on Marvell silicon, it does come with OCZ-developed firmware. And in our review of the Vertex 4, we found that it offered very good write performance and was very fast in handling non-compressible data.

In many respects, the Agility 4 can be considered to be a detuned version of the Vertex 4. While it has the same controller, it gets slower memory, a smaller prefetch cache and possibly a less refined firmware. And in terms of performance, the detuning process shows; as across all benchmarks, the Agility 4 offered roughly 60% to 80% the performance of the Vertex 4.

Compared to SandForce alternatives, the Agility 4 is outmatched when it comes to read performance. However, like the Vertex 4, the Agility 4 has very impressive write performance and in most cases it was able to match or even outperform SandForce drives when it comes to write speed. This is definitely commendable. On a whole, however, the Agility 4’s performance can best be summed up as lackluster, because while it did post some pretty impressive write speeds, its read performance was considerably worse off than the Vertex 4 and the rest of the SandForce drives. Also, performance on benchmarks like PCMark 7 and Iometer, which are focused around specific tasks, also revealed the Agility 4’s shortcomings.

In terms of pricing, the OCZ Agility (256GB) comes in at around S$268, which makes it more affordable than the equivalent capacity Vertex 4 at S$313. It is also more affordable than the other SandForce drives we’ve included here, which typically cost upwards of S$300. But while it may be cheaper, the drop in performance is pretty evident in our benchmarks. So if you ask us, we rather cough up the $30 - $40 more and opt for enthusiast-grade SSD with synchronous NAND memory, because the cut in performance due to the asynchronous NAND memory chips in the Agility 4 is pretty drastic.

In conclusion, while the OCZ Agility 4 refreshes OCZ’s current SSD offerings, it isn’t a compelling mainstream SSD that we would recommend, mainly because of its performance and price. As it is, the Agility 4 is priced too closely to the current crop of enthusiast-grade SSDs, and we would rather pay a bit more for the top of the crop than settle for second best.

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