OCZ Agility 2 vs Intel X-25m

I've been looking at these two drives lately. And based on numbers the OCZ one seems faster, correct? But there's got to be a reason the intel one is so much more expensive. Yes, the intel does have more storage, but that can't be worth double the price when the drives read/write speeds are that much slower?

Here is the exact drives i'm looking at:

Intel X-25m

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

OCZ Agility 2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227543

What do you care more about? Being an Intel fanboy? Or getting better performance value for the amount of storage you're purchasing?

Are you planning on buying an "old OCZ drive" as you put it? You're trying to compare previous generation OCZ SSD's which used slower controllers like the Indilinx Barefoot controller so of course the Intel drives outperformed them.

The OCZ Agility 2 uses SandForce’s SF-1200 controller. The Intel X-25-M G2 beats this OCZ model only in 4KB Random Reads & Writes.

I am not planning on getting an old OCZ drive, but what I was wondering is if anything makes the intel better than just numbers, for example like you stated the sandforce controller, something like that was more of a response I was looking for instead of the traditional intel fanboy attitude response.

Also, what makes the Vertex better than Agility 2? seems like they're the same specs, just Agility 2 has a higher starting price?

Thanks for all the info on in this thread

You'll find benchmarks for all of the above SSDs at:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65

For example, here are the 4kb random read benchmarks I was referencing:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD [...] 26.151.152

Also, unless you need to purchase immediately, Intel is supposed to drop its new G3 drives in Q1, which may force prices down.

Including OS, apps/games, and data, I only use about 160 GB, so 2 TB would be a waste for me. Once you've experienced the speeds of SSD, however, there's no going back. I wouldn't consider a new system without it, but your needs may be different and that's perfectly fine.

Which is why I'll be adding a second 4850 when I do my new build in January, but we really shouldn't hijack the thread from the OP.

he might get both, you never know..

well u dont care about ur bills about electricity, or maybe ur mom pays that for u
4850 in crossfire are like a Dragon with 3head lol
u should sell that 4850 and buy 1 Hd6870

malmental what hardrives you running ?

The good news is that after an initial dip in performance, SSDs tend to level off..

Users typically notice that an SSD drive runs at the manufacturer's stated peak I/O performance at first, but soon after that it begins to drop. That's because, unlike a hard disk drive, any write operation to an SSD requires not one step, but two: an erase followed by the write.

When an SSD is new, the NAND flash memory inside it has been pre-erased; Users start with a clean slate, so to speak. But, as data is written to the drive, data management algorithms in the controller begin to move that data around the flash memory in an operation known as wear-leveling. Even though wear-leveling is meant to prolong the life of the drive, it can eventually lead to performance issues.

SSD performance and endurance are related. Generally, the poorer the performance of a drive, the shorter the lifespan. That's because the management overhead of an SSD is related to how many writes and erases to the drive take place. The more write/erase cycles there are, the shorter the drive's lifespan. Consumer-grade multi-level cell (MLC) memory can sustain from 2,000 to 10,000 write cycles. Enterprise-class single-level cell (SLC) memory can last through 10 times the number of write cycles of an MLC-based drive.

A brief refresher on the difference between the two technologies: SLC simply means one bit of data is written to each flash memory cell, while MLC allows two bits, or more, to be written to cells. MLC drives are notably less expensive than SLC drives.

Manufacturers moderate how long the flash memory in an SSD will last in several ways, but all involve either adding DRAM cache -- so data writes are buffered to reduce the number of write/erase cycles -- or using special firmware located in the drive's processor or controller to combine writes for efficiency.

According to Bob Merritt, an analyst with research firm Convergent Semiconductors, another element of SSD longevity is whether extra memory cells are available and, if so, how many. Some manufacturers over-provision storage, so that when blocks of flash memory wear out, additional blocks become available. For example, a drive may be listed as offering 120GB of memory, but may actually contain 140GB of capacity. The extra 20GB remains unused until it's needed.

The performance problems involving Intel's consumer-grade X25-M SSD were related to its wear-leveling algorithm.

At its most basic, wear-leveling algorithms are used to more evenly distribute data across flash memory so that no one portion wears out faster than another, which prolongs the life of whole drive. The SSD's controller in wear-leveling operations keeps a record of where data is set down on the drive as it's relocated from one portion to another.