OCZ Agility 60GB SSD Review - PAGE 7

Solid state drives are built with high performance in mind and OCZ's Agility certainly delivers the goods. Not only does it turn in some great numbers in our synthetic benchmarks, although not quite as good as the drive's specifications suggest, actual, real-world performance is day and night when put head to head against a mechanical hard drive.

Everything from installing Windows and software in general was noticeably quicker, software from the web browser to heavier applications launch significantly faster. Hard drives tend to slow down and eventually grind to a halt under stress, but it simply never happened with the Agility.

The drive does have a weakness though and that it storage space. Whereas Seagate's latest high-end hard drive sports a whooping 2TB, this solid state drive clocks in at a meager 60GB. However, OCZ really markets these as an operating system drive and to store a few of your key applications where storage speed really matters. A bare Windows 7 x64 Ultimate install with all the latest updates applied leaves you with about 40GB, which leaves enough space for a couple browsers, Photoshop, development apps and even a game or two.

A few other advantages SSDs have is the fact that they have no moving part and thus are completely silent. In a desktop, it's often not a huge plus, but I did notice it immediately when I installed the Agility in my netbook, an ASUS Eee 1000H. Where the stock Seagate drive used to scratch and grind for what seemed like forever, the SSD just got the work done without whining about it. Even though I haven't run any sort of scientific battery life measurements, it does seem to last a tad longer, breaking in at slightly over four hours. I also noticed that, unlike with my previous hard drive, the fan barely ever fired up so power draw definitely took a step, or two, downwards.

Which of these two should you choose? Well, why not get one of each! In fact, OCZ is clear about that -- SSD's are meant to be used as boot drives and should be paired with a high capacity HDD to cover your ever growing storage needs. At $200 for a mere 60GB, they're obviously not in the same realm as HDD's as far as price-per-gigabyte goes, but the Agility is also clearly faster than any of them.

With the Agility, OCZ has the most affordable SSD built around the Indilinx controller, which nets you the all important TRIM command under Windows 7, and the currently available $30 mail-in-rebate only sweetens the deal. Sure, it's not the ridiculously cheap storage HDDs offer, but I must admit that after having used OCZ'S Agility for a couple weeks, I definitely feel the difference when I go back to a mechanical drive. Is the Agility worth the investment? Without any hesitation -- yes!