Final Words & Conclusion
I think it is safe to state that OCZ absolutely tries to dominate the SSD market, and with good success. In each segment of the market they have a product and that is just very much welcomed. The new Agility drive definitely surprised me performance wise. Being a 20 to 25% cheaper drive (compared to the Vertex series) I initially expected a heavily castrated SSD with limited cache memory and average performance.
That certainly isn't the case with the Agility. You receive the top rated Indilinx controller, get 64MB cache memory and pretty spiffy NAND Flash memory from Samsung. The end-result is quite honestly a high-end performing SSD. OCZ might advertise the write speeds at 135MB/sec... the reality is that on average it's faster. When you combine that with 230+ MB/sec read performance then you have a product that is closing in on the Vertex and is roughly as fast as the OCZ Summit.
As such we once more can recommend an SSD drive from OCZ very very much. Though SSD prices need to drop even further, this drive costs you roughly 2.4 EUR per gigabyte. Sure still too expensive, but last year that was 3 EUR per GB.
The one thing that puzzles me is that OCZ positions this drive as mainstream, and sure, while the pricing is better it retains a high-end price tag. Personally I'd have positioned this drive in the lower segment of high-end performance and priced products. But yeah, there is definitely a slow shift taking place in the land of SSDs. Don't forget, compared to last year the prices have gone down (though slowly), yet performance almost doubled up plus we now have luxurious caches keeping our files transferred fast and spiffy. In that respect the future of SSD drives is looking bright and sunny.
Okay the bottom line -- we were impressed by OCZ's Agility for sure, blazing speeds, stunning access times and a nice cache making the SSD very suitable for any operating system. Oh and of course, SSD drives are going to rock once Windows 7 launches, that OS is completely optimized for SSD performance. The future of SSD drives is looking good and bright, and products like the Agility as such bring a big smile to my face.
Bottom line: I would not hesitate using this drive as a primary boot partition for an operating system or for that matter in my laptop. Either way, we recommend the drive for sure, as we know you'll love it.
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