OCZ Agility 3 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final ThoughtsFinishing this review off, some may feel that the Agility 3 is very similar to the Vertex 3, and you’re right, but it offers something a little bit more and that’s a better price point. Price wise, you’ll be looking at £293.09 from Scan or $369.99 at Newegg giving UK users a bit of a raw deal. The performance is slightly worse than the Vertex 3, but this review isn’t a comparison between products, as the Agility 3 still offers a lot more in terms of performance than other drives on the market.

For general desktop usage, you won’t be disappointed in the Agility 3 as it performs with the very best speeds on the market for a SATA III based drive, and will be perfect to use in the likes of a notebook or desktop machine as the master boot drive. If you’re using mass amounts of files of different sizes and file structures, then you may be faced with a few problems and that all comes down the the async memory used on the Agility 3.

As was shown in some of the tests, the speed and performance were hindered when using certain applications and that stems from the incompressible data used in the likes of AS SSD and other key software. On the other hand, we saw the likes of ATTO showing us what this drive is really about and whilst the key point of any SSD is the overall user experience, that comes down to being very much opinion based and your perception of time. Boot times, application loading and general gaming is a key test to me as it allows me to perceive the amount of time taken in my everyday tasks and the Agility 3 can’t be faulted in that particular area at all.

At the end of the day, the Agility 3 range of drives are focussed on the money concious and are aimed at a particular segment in the market where users want the very best for the very least amount of money and that’s exactly what we have on offer here, to a certain degree. A new SandForce Driven SSD which has been implemented by the best in the business and can offer up fantastic results. It’s the heart and soul of a drive like this that really makes it stand out, and that all comes down to the little bits of detail that OCZ have their minds set on including the layout of the PCB and the firmware used which allows the user to benefit from the super fast performance whilst not suffering with reliability and stability issues that other SSD’s show on a daily basis.

OCZ also believe that due to their engineered design and custom firmware, their drives will last longer just by utilising a few little tweaks, of which the main one is reducing the performance by a minimal amount. By doing so, it will allow the Agility 3 to last for longer periods of time and the end user is unlikely to notice any real-world differences when comparing the speed of the drive.

The price of the Agility 3 isn’t too dissimilar from that of the Agility 2 and Vertex 2, but of course uses the faster SATA controller this time around, leaving no room for error or bottlenecking.

The bottom line is that we feel for the money, there are better drives on the market and the choice in trying to make the drive cheaper by using asynchronous flash has left us with a bitter taste in our mouths and can’t wait to get stuck into the Vertex 3 where we know for a fact, we will see some results that are true to what is listed on paper. It does offer a good deal for users who have never experienced the speed of an SSD before, but we’d most likely advise in spending a bit more and going for a drive with synchronous flash instead but sometimes we know this isn’t always possible and that’s where the Agility 3 really does pull through; bang for buck.