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Testing

The OCZ Agility Two drive was subjected to our usual battery of tests which was in the order to keep things consistent. This employs a myriad of testing programs, which will be described below.

Testing Ethos and Methodology

Whilst there were no available alternative Sandforce based drives from any other manufacturer to compare with! So we decided that the comparison could be made with older drives, such as OCZ solid Two and the Samsung  P64 drive. For those whom have an existing solid state drive, one must demonstrate why the consumer must upgrade from their existing drive to a Sandforce based product.

Testing equipment

• DFI X58 T3EH8 UT motherboard

• Triple Channel DDR 2000MHz GEIL EVO Ram but set at 1866 9-9-928-1T

• Comparison drives: OCZ Solid two, Corsair P64 drives

Software Used

• HDtach

• HDTune

• Atto Disk Mark

• Crystal Disk Mark

• AS-SSD

Traditionally Solid state drives are recommended in two categories. Burst and large file transfer/Sequential read/writes for a storage or 4k read/writes results for a boot (or OS) drive.

All tests were conducted by running each utility A total of three times and the middle result was taken. Here at overclockers tech we like to be a little different. Instead of pleasing the reader’s eyes with lots of pretty bar charts, we have instead opted for the more real and down to earth approach. All our test results have the actual Screenshots which allows the reader to see with their own eyes, the  data first hand. Bar charts are nice but they are second-hand information whilst the screenshots are first hand.

HDTACH

HDTACH has been around for a long time and has been used in many reviews. However it does give a fair indication of any drives performance as far as burst-rate and sequential read/write performance.

OCZ Agility Two Results

OCZ Solid Two Results

Here we can see that the Sandforce SF-1200 controller gives the most stable results. The Solid Two and the corsair P64 give rather varying results given their performance plotted on the graph. The OCZ Agility Two also shows the best burst speed- giving close to the actual read score of SATA 2 specification.

HDTUNE

Next to HDTach, HDTune is also a well known tool and almost as ‘long in the tooth’ however it does give us a little more information than HDTACH!

OCZ Agility Two Results

OCZ Solid Two Performance

Once again we can see that the Agility two gives the most stable performance, as shown on the graphs. In addition the minimum, average and maximum speeds are much higher than of the other drives. Clearly showing that the OCZ Agility Two has the most stable controller card out of the three.

ATTO DISK MARK

Atto Disk Mark is amongst this writers’ favourite tools. The aforementioned; measures the storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and tests for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize the performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

OCZ Agility Two Results

OCZ Solid Two Perfromance

Once again we can see that the OCZ Agility Two, simply powers ahead of the competition. But what is shocking is if we take a look at the results we can see that the write speed is actually faster than the read speed! This is most certainly unusual; so the tests were re-applied another five times and the same results came back. Truly we see a new era dawning in drive technology.  Traditionally the read speed is faster than the write, however this concept no longer applies as one can see here!

Crystal Disk Mark

Crystal Disk Mark is a well respected utility, designed to check the performance of a hard drive especially in 4k read/write areas. Traditionally Intel drives are faster than any other manufacturer in this section.

OCZ Agility TWO Results

OCZ Solid Two Performance

Some very unusual and interesting results here, it appears that the old Indlinix Barefoot controller on the ‘Solid Two’ model out performs the sandforce based drive in sections such as sequential writes and 4k reads, whilst the Corsair p64 simply wipes the floor with the Agility and Solid Two drives in the same. OCZ recommend that you align the drives before testing, so this reviewer went back and tested again. Once more the results come back the same.

However having mentioned the above the agility two simply wipes the floor with the other two models in regards to 4k write performance.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD has a sterling reputation in the benchmarking of Solid State drives. This utility has a growing fan base and many review sites are using this to check their hardware.

OCZ Agility Two Results

OCZ Solid Two Performance

Confirming the results gleaned by Crystal mark, once again the Corsair and OCZ Solid Two drives out perform the Sandforce drive in certain tests. Judging by all the results obtained it seems that Sandforce controllers have been optimised for 4k writes and it seems this is where the drive really shines!