Review-OCZ Agility 3 SSD: SandForce 2 Goes Mainstream

File Transfer Test

That’s it for the synthetic benchmarks, let us move on to real-world file transfer test! Six gigabytes worth of small files from the SSD to the test platform’s primary storage drive and vice versa. Then, we repeated the procedure using 6 GB of large files. Results are presented in seconds. During some attempts, the Agility 3 finishes the test in 2 minutes, which is unusually slow for a SandForce 2-controlled SSD. Perhaps performance was reduced because the SandForce controller had to access compressed files stored in Agility 3’s slower ONFi 1.0 NAND flash.

TRIM Test

TRIM is supposed to restore drive performance by clearing junk data accumulated in an SSD’s NAND memory chips. How good is the implementation on Agility 3?

The above screenshot shows Agility 3’s performance at its best, freshly wiped with Secure Erase.

Then, we filled the SSD with around 48 gigabytes of data by directly overwriting files previously contained in it. As this picture shows, performance was dramatically reduced afterwards, halving Agility 3’s speed from 500 MB/s to just around 200 MB/s (see the drop on left side of the blue graph).

Microsoft’s specification states that TRIM should be triggered whenever Windows calls for “Delete”, “Empty Recycle Bin”, dan “Format” operations. However, that seems to be not the case here. We were surprised to see Agility 3 failing to fully recover its performance. We repeated this test for three more times, only to see the same result. By formatting the drive, we managed to restore Agility 3’s performance, although not quite to its original 500 MB/s transfer rate.