Is this SSD any good or not?

[watters1996]

Hi all, I was on the PC World website earlier looking at the SSD's and i came across an offer for a 'OCZ AGT3-25SAT3-60G Agility 3 60GB SATA III 2.5 inch SSD' which is only £45.
At the moment i have a 250gb sata2 hard drive which is my primary drive (windows and programs) but because i have 2 other 500gb drives with all my data on the primary drive only has 50gb used so the 60gb should be more than enough to but the basics on (such as windows 7, itunes, firefox ect.) and all the larger programs (such as games and roxio) will be put on the 250gb one.

So anyway what are your opinions of this SSD and is it any good before i buy it?
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/ocz-agt3-25sat3-60g-agility-3-internal-2-5-sata-ssd-60-gb-12278422-pdt.html

 

[echondo]

If the Agility 3 is the same as the Vertex 3 then it might have firmware issues and runs off of a Sandforce controller. Now some people do not like the Sandforce controller for some reason but I do not mind it. If there is any issue with the drive then you could update the firmware and it should fix any issues.

I have an old Vertex 1 drive from OCZ myself, still running strong for the years I've had it on, never had to do a firmware update myself nor is there any bad sectors on the drive.

Personally, I would say go for it, if you do have problems with the drive you could always return it or try your best and fix it yourself via firmware updates.

 

[watters1996]

okay i'll go and fetch it tomorrow. My motherboard is a gigabyte 970a-ds3 which runs 6 sata3 ports. But ive heard online that the drive has complications when it runs at sata3?

 

[echondo]

okay i'll go and fetch it tomorrow. My motherboard is a gigabyte 970a-ds3 which runs 6 sata3 ports. But ive heard online that the drive has complications when it runs at sata3?

And where did you read that exactly? The drive itself is a SATA 3 drive, so I do not quite understand how the drive has complications with it's own connector type. Are you sure you didn't read that the drive had problems with a SATA 3 Marvell or Intel based controller on the motherboard?

 

[watters1996]

And where did you read that exactly? The drive itself is a SATA 3 drive, so I do not quite understand how the drive has complications with it's own connector type. Are you sure you didn't read that the drive had problems with a SATA 3 Marvell or Intel based controller on the motherboard?

im not sure of the exact website because ive been reading quite a few pages on the SSD. And yeah i think it was problems with the marvell controller. I have the AMD SB950 south bridge which runs the sata3 (6 gbps) so everything should be okay and run at a fast speed?

 

[echondo]

im not sure of the exact website because ive been reading quite a few pages on the SSD. And yeah i think it was problems with the marvell controller. I have the AMD SB950 south bridge which runs the sata3 (6 gbps) so everything should be okay and run at a fast speed?

I found a post on the Marvell controller: http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/189740-bsod-asus-p8z68-marvell-controller.html

As for speeds, I can't find any benchmarks on the SSD but it reportedly has up to

Sustained Sequential Read
up to 525 MB/s (SATA 6Gbps)
up to 280 MB/s (SATA 3Gbps)

Sustained Sequential Write
up to 475 MB/s (SATA 6Gbps)
up to 260 MB/s (SATA 3Gbps)

Also I found the drive a bit cheaper;

http://www.ebuyer.com/268239-ocz-60gb-agility-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-60g
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/60gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-475mb-s-80k-iops
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004Z0S6RU/?tag=pcp0f-21

 

[watters1996]

I found a post on the Marvell controller: http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/189740-bsod-asus-p8z68-marvell-controller.html

As for speeds, I can't find any benchmarks on the SSD but it reportedly has up to

Sustained Sequential Read
up to 525 MB/s (SATA 6Gbps)
up to 280 MB/s (SATA 3Gbps)

Sustained Sequential Write
up to 475 MB/s (SATA 6Gbps)
up to 260 MB/s (SATA 3Gbps)

Also I found the drive a bit cheaper;

http://www.ebuyer.com/268239-ocz-60gb-agility-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-60g
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/60gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-475mb-s-80k-iops
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004Z0S6RU/?tag=pcp0f-21

Okay, thanks mate, really cleared that all up for me. Im gonna buy it tomorrow. Last thing, Could you explain what '80,000 IOPS' means please

 

[echondo]

Okay, thanks mate, really cleared that all up for me. Im gonna buy it tomorrow. Last thing, Could you explain what '80,000 IOPS' means please

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS

I'm not very good at explaining certain things, but it means how fast the drive is and it means "operations per second" which can be converted by "IOPS x TransferSizeInBytes = BytesPerSec".

Here is a video and benchmarks on the SSD. If you want to just see the benchmarks then skip to 4:20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eG0Y78qSrM

 

[watters1996]

Ok, thanks a lot for all your help

 

[cin19]

I hope it will be not too later.

If you can just buy other SSD. I don't mean the Agility 3 is not good, but it is not good enough to recommend to buy.

Agility 3 is not a real SATAIII SSD which use the asynchronous ONFi NAND. That means it is like the SATAII SSD. The company want to make the SSD look good, they use the ATTO to run the benchmark as advertisement speed.

Check the link for the review:
http://rbmods.com/ocz-agility-3-60gb-ssd/
http://www.ocztechnology.com/res/manuals/OCZ_Agility3_Product_sheet.pdf

If you check the AS-SSD benchmark ( AS-SSD run Incompressible data for real usage), you will see what is going on. And the
SandForce controller is not problem, the problem is that who make the firmware. Like intel that use the same controller but it make the very good firmware and its SSD is very reliable.

Your MB has the SATA III that is from AMD, but you can install the AMD SATA driver or use the default driver from MSFT. The SATA 6Gb/s are compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5Gb/s standard.

Get this Samsung SSD 830 for 53 pounds http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-2-5inch-Desktop-Accessory-Norton/dp/B005OK6VIG/ref=sr_1_30?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1348448103&sr=1-30