OCZ Agility 3 240 GB SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark Vantage

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: The OCZ Agility 3 shows a very discernible performance difference on the sequential reads scoring less than half if its Vertex 3 brethren although the writes are right in line. The smaller read/writes really don’t show much of a difference at all.

PCMark Vantage 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

This is our first use of the new PCMark software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: This version of PCMark Vantage was just released so for some comparison, we grabbed a few drives we’ve tested before to get some point of reference. The Agility 3 was outscored across the board by both the Vertex 3 and Intel 510 Series although the scores were all pretty close.