Amazon has a gold box offer today on the OCZ Agility 3 SSD. The deal is for the 90GB capacity – $99.99 with no rebates which is $40 less than current street price. The Agility 3 uses a SandForce SF-2281 processor and asynchronous NAND to crank out advertised speeds up to 525MB/s read and 500MB/s writes. In our 2MB sequential transfer test, we measured actual speeds of the 240GB capacity model at 499MB/s read and 460MB/s write.
Amazon has a gold box offer today on the OCZ Agility 3 SSD. The deal is for the 90GB capacity – $99.99 with no rebates which is $40 less than current street price. The Agility 3 uses a SandForce SF-2281 processor and asynchronous NAND to crank out advertised speeds up to 525MB/s read and 500MB/s writes. In our 2MB sequential transfer test, we measured actual speeds of the 240GB capacity model at 499MB/s read and 460MB/s write.
The Agility 3, like other asynchronous SandForce SSDs, have done a great job of generating very good performance in most areas, while keeping costs down. This particular offer puts the 90GB drive roughly 30% less than same capacity competitors like the Corsair Force 3 and Kingston V+200.
StorageReview Quick Take of the OCZ Agility 3
In terms of how its performance ranks against the enthusiast-class Vertex 3 or Vertex 3 MAX IOPS, we noted strong performance of the 240GB capacity in our StorageMark 2010 Productivity trace.
Pros
- Great performance for a mainstream targeted audience
- Aggressive pricing compared to Vertex 3
- Lower power consumption than Vertex 3 or Vertex 3 MAX IOPS
Cons
- Max sequential speeds cut in half with fully random data
Bottom Line
By mixing the same great SandForce SF-2281 processor with a SATA 6Gb/s interface and lower-cost asynchronous NAND, OCZ was able to straddle the cost/performance fence quite well with the Agility 3. The OCZ Agility 3 will find plenty of traction with buyers wanting near top-end performance without the top-end price.
