Product Listing

OCZ Agility 4 (256GB) - Indilinx Goes Mainstream

By Kenny Yeo - 12 Nov 2012

Conclusion

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.

The OCZ Agility 4 is really a detuned Vertex 4, and it shows in its performance. However, we feel that it is priced too closely to enthusiast-grade SSDs to make it a compelling choice.

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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7.0
  • Performance 7
  • Features 6.5
  • Value 7
The Good
Good write performance for its class
The Bad
Priced too high
Poor read performance
No installation brackets/racks provided
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