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Performance
We stacked the OCZ Agility 3 up against a few SATA 3 SSDs and hard drives on the market, including the 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT, the Plextor PX-256M2S, and of course its brother the Vertex 3. Overall, the Agility was very fast in our testing but it was sometimes noticeably slower than the Vertex 3.
In the boot-time test, the Agility 3 took a very short time, just 29.7 seconds, while the Vertex 3 took 29.1 seconds and the Plextor PX-256M2S took 28.2 seconds. Note that this boot time includes the computer's hardware initialization, which takes about 15 seconds. The Agility 3 was similarly fast at shutting down, taking just 6.7 seconds.
In the Office performance test, in which we time how long the computer takes to finish a comprehensive set of different concurrent tasks including Word, Excel, and file transfer and compression, the Agility 3 took the third place with a time of 390 seconds, after the 338 seconds of the Vertex 3 and the 383 seconds of the Plextor PX-256M2S.
It seems the drive's speed doesn't affect music conversion much, as the test machine took exactly the same amount of time--113 seconds--as all the drives we've reviewed. However, in our multimedia multitasking test, in which the computer converts a high-definition movie from one format to another while iTunes is doing a heavy job of music conversion in the background, the Agility was the second-slowest, taking 331 seconds, just 9 seconds less than the Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive.
All the tests above are designed to gauge a computer's performance as a whole, meaning the hard drive only plays a small role in the final score. The throughput test is the most important test for showing the drive's real-world performance in transferring data from one place to another. We conduct the throughput performance test by timing how long it takes for a drive to finish copying a large amount of data from one place to another. With hard drives, we do this both with the drive as the main bootable drive hosting the OS and while using it as a secondary backup drive. The Agility 3, though clearly slower than its peers, did well in both cases.
As the main drive of a computer, the Agility scored 101.67MBps, compared with the Seagate Barracuda XT's 51.1MBps. Note that in this case the drive performs both reading and writing at the same time. When used as a backup drive and performing writing only, the Agility 3 did much better at 207.75MBps, again about doubling the Barracuda XT's performance. While these numbers are impressive, they were still around one-third and one-fifth lower than those of the Vertex 3, which scored 150.01MBps and 260.71MBps when used as a main and backup drive respectively. For this reason, if the Agility 3 cost around $350 for the 240GB capacity rather than $470, we'd consider it an excellent drive.
Nonetheless, we were happy with its performance. For general daily usage, from application loading to boot time to playing games, we noticed almost no distinguishable difference between the Agility 3 and the Vertex 3. However, if you're in the business of having to deal with large chunks of data at a time, such as editing HD movies or copying lots of data rapidly from one place to another, the Vertex 3 or the Plextor PX-256M2S seems like a better deal.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Multimedia multitasking | |
iTunes | |
Office |
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Shutdown | |
Boot time |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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As secondary drive | |
As OS drive |
Service and support
OCZ backs the Agility 3 with a three-year warranty, which is decent, and similar to what the Samsung 470 and the Plextor PX-256M2S have. When it comes to storage device warranties, the length of the warranty is the most important factor, and it would be even better if OCZ offered a five-year warranty for the Agility 3 as Seagate Technology does for the Momentus XT.
Conclusions
Increase the Agility 3's performance a bit and lower its price a sizable notch and the Agility 3 would be one of the best deals on the market. In its current state, however, the drive still makes a very good replacement drive for any computer, be it a desktop or laptop, Mac or PC, especially one that has built-in support for SATA 6Gbps.
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