OCZ Agility 3 120GB Solid State Drive

The Agility 3 is offered in a green black box which isn’t any different to their other SSD packaging apart from the color scheme used. All key features of the drive are clearly printed on the front and back of the box, so anyone can make a sound buying decision.

Opening up the box you’re offered with an installation guide, a sticker that says “MY SSD IS FASTER THAN YOUR HDD”. If the nerd in you can’t resist the urge of sticking this somewhere, I’m sure it’ll turn out to be a cool bumper sticker.

The drive itself isn’t any different to other OCZ Solid State Drives apart from the branding of the model along with its unique color scheme.

Taking apart the back cover of the drive reveals all its internals. (Note that doing this will void your warranty). In direct view you see the PCB with 8 x 8GB NAND flash modules while the remaining 8 modules are on the rear side of it. 8GB x 16 modules give you 128GB; the additional 8GB is used by the drive to maximize read/write performance.

The heart & soul of any solid state drive lies in the controller chip which is responsible for everything that the drive does. The OCZ Agility 3 uses a SandForce SF-2281 controller which turns out to be used in the Vertex 3 as well. SandForce have built a very good name for themselves for producing highly reliable and high performance SSD controllers at a much more competitive price point compared to its competitors. The SF-2200 series is designed to take advantage of SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) speeds and capable of sequential read and write operations at 500 MB/s. If you’re interested to read more check out the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce

Okay that pretty much covers everything about the drive, so lets head on to the tests to see how well the drive performs in real life.