OCZ Agility 2 Extended 60GB Review - PAGE 1

The SandForce controller has been all the rage this past year, and even though the controller is relatively new to the market all major SSD manufacturers have or intend to have a drive based on the new design. There are a few main reasons behind the success of the SandForce controller. First is that it's capable of max write performance of 285MB/s and max reads of 275MB/s. The second reason is that it eliminates the need of on-board cache required by drives using the Indilinx Barefoot controller. This is done via SandForce's DuraClass technologies which essentially uses a real-time lossless compression algorithm to store data in the unallocated portion of the NAND flash memory, which can be accessed though the controller.

The SandForce controller can be found in both consumer and enterprise models and each have enhanced features depending on which market we look at. The SF-1500 is the enterprise model and as such includes larger amount of memory set aside for data protection, and technologies such as "Dura-Write" and RAISE. However, in the consumer market, data protection is not quite as essential so smaller amounts of memory are set aside, which increases the storage capacity. This is all done though the firmware, with a specific version used for the different segments of the market. The trade off for the consumer though is that models using the SF-1200 controller have a cap of 10,000 IOPS placed on the small file random write performance.

All of this build-up leads us to the Agility 2 "extended" from OCZ. This drive utilizes the SF-1200 controller, includes the consumer level firmware and is part of their value oriented lineup. This all allows the Agility 2 to offer users a high level of performance, but with a $169.00 price tag that places it firmly in the mainstream SSD market. For additional value this model gives the user increased storage via the firmware, which increases the drive capacity from 50GB to 60GB. Still, the Agility 2 does come with a much higher premium than a larger capacity HDD, so you are paying for a performance increase while sacrificing large amounts of storage.

The is the second SandForce based drive to enter our labs this month, and it will be interesting to see how it compares to the recently reviewed Corsair Force.

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