Digital Technology & Future Center

SSD’s come in a lot of flavors and capacities but they only come in two basic types. Single level cell and Multi-Level cell. Multi-Level cell SSD’s store two bits of information per cell and are less expensive. The storage of 2 bits of information in each Nand flash cell is harder on the drive and typically each cell can be written and erased 10,000 times. Multi level cell SSD’s still last a good long time and provide up to 10 years static storage without power running to the drive. They take a little longer to write because of the complexity of writing two bits of information to one cell.Single level cell SSD’s only write one bit of information to each cell and they are considered enterprise class drives and have a much longer longevity. They also write faster because of the simplicity of writing one bit of information to each cell. How much longer do they last you ask, well like we mentioned typical MLC drives write and erase each cell approximately 10,000 times, Single level cell drives write and erase each cell up to 100,000 times. Hence our deduction that Single level cell SSD’s can have 10 times the longevity of MLC drives. That longevity comes at a premium price but it’s not ten times more for a SLC drive than a MLC drive.

The OCZ Agility EX 60GB drive we are looking at today runs about $400 so they are pricey drives. That works out to $6.67 per Gigabyte of storage which is expensive compared to ordinary platter drives. Take your run of the mill 500GB platter drive which can easily be found for about $59.99 for a 7200 RPM 16MB cache drive, those run about $0.11 a gigabyte. The platter drives tend to run in the 60 – 70MB/s range and most end users settle for that and are happy with the considerable savings.

Not everyone is a typical end user. Blade and other servers depend on rack after rack of very expensive power hungry hard drives. Most are mission critical servers that have to have the utmost in dependability and speed. Enter what has become to be known in the industry as Enterprise class drives. The first Enterprise class drives that we saw were platter based drives and ran about 30MB in size, 30MB ran about $269 and dependability was spotty. Way down the line after the Dinosaurs died off we started seeing SCSI drives that ran up to 10K RPM and had higher platter density.

SCSI or Small Computer Serial Interface drives could daisy chain 8 synchronized platter drive on a chain of up to 8 drives. The higher platter density meant that the physical hard drive read heads had to travel less distance to fetch information and the 10k RPM drive speed meant that it got there faster. However imagine rack after rack of SCSI drive generating heat and pushing the power bill ever higher. We’ve worked on SCSI racks and the noise and heat on a 48 drive rack can be considerable, not to mention the failure rate and expense of powering all those drives.

Now imagine those same hundred drives converted to reliable enterprise class SSD’s sipping a mere fraction of a watt (.5w idle 2w active) per drive, with no moving parts, and a minimum of heat, designed to last 100,000 write/erase cycles. Then when they do decide to fail the firmware on the drive will stop allowing the data to be written on the drive and revert to a read only state. That’s a server farm operators dream come true.

Well now the average end user can have Enterprise class storage in their desktop, OCZ has the EX series drives and we are going to take a look at the OCZ Agility EX 60GB SSD. Designed with the Indilinx Barefoot controller found in most of OCZ’s offerings it’s by far our favorite controller. Seated in the Agility EX drive it can push the Nand flash up to 255MB/s read and 195MB/s write (100MB/s sustained write).

The OCZ Agility SLC 60GB drive promises great performance and excellent longevity. With the read speed advertised at up to 255MB/s and the write speed up to 195MB/s we expect big things from the Agility EX SSD. How OCZ managed to squeeze all that speed into this little package, and do it with the most affordable 60GB SLC SSD we’ve seen is a mystery to us. Being the least expensive 60GB SLC around is sure to make it a popular choice amoung the most demanding enthusiasts.

Specs

• Available in 60GB (64) capacities*
• 64MB Onboard Cache
• SLC NAND
• Seek Time: <.1ms
• Slim 2.5″ Design
• 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm
• Lightweight 77g
• Operating Temp: 0C ~ 70C
• Storage Temp: -45C ~ +85C
• Low Power Consumption: 2W operation, .5W standby
• Shock Resistant 1500G
• RAID Support
• MTBF 1.5 million hours
• 3-Year Warranty

The Agility EX is only available in one capacity and that’s 60GB it utilizes the Indilinx Barefoot controller, which in our experience is the fastest controller to date, and has a whopping 64GB onboard cache. Average seek time is under 0.1ms and it has the common 2.5 inch SSD form factor. Operating temperatures run at 0° C ~ 70° C and apparently you can store one of the Agility EX in a blast freezer because they can store at -45° C and as hot as 85° C.

Idle power consumption is an attractive 0.5w and while in active operation it merely sips at power and uses 2w total. The drive supports Raid (Drool) and has an average MTBF of 1.5 Million hours and a 3 year warranty. Hard drive MTBF has been losing confidence in the computing world and is generally highly over-estimated. We mean face it 1.5 million hours mean time before failure that’s what 62,500 days, or 171 years, not many electronic items around today will be in operation in the year 2180. Sorry it’s just not likely to happen, more realistically we’d say 4 – 6 years dependable operation. If anyone would like to dispute that feel free to show us a 170 year old SSD still in operation. Besides in 4 – 6 years current SSD’s will be so obsolete it’s a moot point.

Performance Expectations

• 60GB Max Performance
• Read: Up to 255MB/s
• Write: Up to 195MB/s
• Sustained Write: Up to 100MB/s
• Part Number 60GB – OCZSSD2-1AGTEX60G
  Performance wise we’d like to see 255MB/s or approaching that, 195MB/s write we’ll have to see it to believe it, 100MB/s sustained, we can believe that but we still want to see it. Give us 200MB/s sustained read and 100MB/s sustained write and tear of joy will flow like water. Okay maybe not but we’d probably crack open a brew and celebrate.

We are just starting to use AS SSD Benchmark on a regular basis, now that it’s had a few revisions and produces reliable results we will add drives as we go. In the mean time this round we only have the SSDNow and OCZ Agility on the chart, as we mentioned we are not comparing the Value based SSDNow to the more expensive Agility drive but we wanted to have a comparison drive on the new benchmark so we are posting the charts.

AS SSD Benchmark is a new addition to the SSD Testing arsenal at Bjorn, still in development by a German Systems Developer his thread about AS SSD Benchmark can be found on the OCZ Forums. www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php

The benefits of the AS SSD Benchmark are:

• Good precision of results
• Simplicity of use
• Optimized for SSD
• Screenshot-function
• It’s freeware

Another benefit of the AS SSD Benchmark is it’s still in development and being updated as SSD technology advances. We’ll have to wait and see if it survives the test of time.

The 4k-64k Thrd test in AS SSD is a threaded test that used multi-threaded reads and writes to test the drive. In this chart it’s the read portion and the Kingston drive hit 34.2MB/s which is a great score for a variable write size threaded test.

The 4k-64k Thrd write replaces the Crystal DiskMark 4k test as the most brutal write test we’ve seen and the Agility scores a 17.84MB/s and compared to most platter drives this is a dream speed in this brutal test.

In the 4k read test which is generally brutal on any drive the Agility Ex turned in a 28.07MB/s, and at this level of testing, from previous experience we know 28.07MB/s is an excellent score for a 4K test.

The Agility turns in a solid 16.22MB/s in the 4K write test and compared to the platter drives we tested (which took in excess of 1 hour to test) the Agility EX scores really well. Typically the platter drives we tested ran about 1.6MB/s in this test but in all fairness the benchmark is designed for newer faster SSD’s.

The Sequential read test shows the Agility Ex 60GB drive turning in an amazing 243.2MB/s in the AS SSD Benchmark and a lot of the other tests show about the same sequential read speed so were comfortable with saying this drive reads faster than any drive we’ve ever seen.

Sequential write speeds on the Agility EX have been fantastic and we think we can sum up it’s sequential write speeds with a single word; Drool.

The OCZ Agility EX 60GB SLC drive performs better than any other drive we’ve tested. The Agility EX Indilinx controller conbined with it’s SLC nature and high quality Nand flash does everything but send up smoke signals exclaiming “I’m the fastest”.

It’s hard to not like a drive that consistantly reads in the 200+MB/s range sequentially. That blazing speed will ensure that application load times will be faster and your rig will be more responsive.

The SLC design ensures that your data will be safe and you’ll enjoy a nice long life from the Agility EX.

Beyond life span the drive is just about to good to be true. Read and write speeds were consistantly high, higher than we expected.

OCZ fielded the Agility EX 60GB SLC SSD at $399 and that seems like a lot of cash for that much storage, however that’s the least expensive 60GB SSD we could find so prive is subjective. Performance isn’t subjective and frankly this is the fastest single drive we’ve ever seen.

We are using an addition to our scoring system to provide additional feedback beyond a flat score. Please note that the final score isn’t an aggregate average of the new rating system.

• Performance 8.5
• Value 10
• Quality 10
• Warranty 9
• Features 9
• Innovation 9

Pros:

+ System Is Snappier
+ Fantastic RAID Like Speed
+ Quiet
+ Never Gets Hot
+ Standard SATA Interface
+ Easy To Hide In The Chassis
+ Did We Mention Fast Really Fast

Cons:

- Price Still Higher Than Traditional Platter Drives
- Platter Drives Will Never Satisfy You Again

The OCZ Agility EX 60GB is a lightning fast SSD and everything about it screams performance, we were so impressed with the Agility EX that we posted a guard on it, okay so all we could afford to guard it was a Hamster but he’s a noisy little bugger when people come close, we hear one single squeak from that exercise wheel and all they’ll find of the offender will be hamster sized bites. All joking aside the OCZ Agility EX is so fast it’s going to be hard moving to another drive, the consistency of that speed amazed us so it earns a final score 9 out of 10.

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