OCZ was the first manufacturer to implement the renowned performance of the Indilinx Barefoot controller in their SSD solutions with the ground-breaking Vertex Series, which paved the way for a surge of “me-too” solutions. Determined to remain innovative, OCZ developed two unique SSD series, Vertex Turbo and Agility, focused on higher performance and greater affordability. Furthermore, OCZ’s concern with SSD performance degradation spawned its quest for the “garbage collection” and TRIM support found in OCZ SSDs today.Today I will be looking at one of the latest solid-state drive offerings from OCZ, the 256GB Agility 4. OCZ has built their reputation on manufacturing high quality memory and solid state drives for every corner of the market, from enthusiast level to the average user. The Agility 4 uses the new IndiLinx Everest 2 platform and was engineered to offer best in class performance across a wide range of applications. With lightning quick read and write speeds when connected to a SATA III compatible motherboard, the Agility 4 could breathe new life into storage solutions.OCZ SATA based product and the Agility line being the budget option for those who aren’t necessarily interested in top of the line performance, but want to get into the SSD game.With the 3rd generation Vertex and Agility series SSDs, the main difference between the two (other than price of course) was the NAND flash being used onboard. Whereas the Vertex 3 used faster, more expensive 25nm IMFT ONFi 2.x Synchronous NAND (up to 200 MB/s), the Agility 3 used older, less expensive, and consequently slower 25nm IMFT ONFi 1.0 Asynchronous NAND (up to 50 MB/s). Those interested in learning more about ONFi specifications, please visit the ONFi website here .Of course since then, OCZ has unveiled the new Vertex 4, which is an excellent, high performing drive still based off of IMFT’s 25nm ONFi 2.x Synchronous NAND, but is now carrying OCZ’s in-house Indilinx Everest 2 controller (Marvell hardware, Indilinx firmware) rather than a SandForce based offering, which had been staple in both 2nd and 3rd generation Vertex and Agility series products. It’s only logical then since the Vertex series is receiving a controller update that the Agility series receive an update as well.This then brings us to our review for today, the new OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD. As expected, the new Agility 4 will be using OCZ’s in-house Indilinx Everest 2 controller, very much like the Vertex 4, but will be using 25nm IMFT Asynchronous NAND instead, very much like the Agility 3 SSD.Here we actually get some shots of the actual internals of the SSD. The PCB has a total of sixteen chips of OCZ’s own branded MLC NAND: eight on the back and eight on the front. Each chip stores 16GB, and is controlled by the Indilinx Everest 2 controller we see in between them. What’s interesting about this SSD is that it not only has a SATA port at one end for use as a normal 2.5″ drive, it also has an mSATA connector at the other end, for use on boards such as the ASUS P8Z77 Premium, which carry an mSATA port on-board (mostly for caching SSD’s). However, in order to use the SSD in this configuration, you have to take it apart, which we do not recommend doing as it voids your warranty.
The Agility 4 SSD comes with a considerable list of features. The most important you should look for at this stage is the SATA III support. Before mid-2011, this kind of support was highly uncommon. However, the second generation of SSD controllers (such as the Indilinx Everest 2 or SandForce SF-2281) permitted for 6Gbps support, and the majority of SSD’s now come with this capability. For those who may not follow SSD’s, this is very important as the older 3Gbps limit of SATA II will bottleneck a solid-state drive.In addition to the faster controller, the SSD also supports high capacities, ranging up to 512GB’s of storage space. This is good, because SSD’s traditionally have had lower capacities than hard drives: the high price of flash-based devices means high capacity SSD’s have found few buyers in the marketplace. However, quantities up to 512GB of space is nice to see as it alleviates some of the concerns users face about filling up their SSD’s.
SATA 6Gbps Interface
Best-in-Class Indilinx Controller Technology
Up to 85,000 Random 4K Write IOPS
Available in 64GB to 512GB Capacities
Access Latency as Low as 0.02ms
Strong performance at Lower Queue Depths
TRIM Support
- Nice Performance.
- Good Performance/Price Ratio.
- mSATA connector for onboard use.
- TRIM Support.
- 2Xnm MLC NAND.
- 3.5" tray is not included.
- Read Performance is shaky.
