Agility 4 Drive

Agility 4 is an affordable and performance equipped SSD which is built around the company's flagship Vertex 4 SSD series. The SSD boasts of a SATA III interface and is an asynchronous NAND equipped drive like the Agility 3. However, Agility 4 comes with OCZ Technology's proprietary 'Indinlix Infused' Everest II Solid State Flash Processor instead of the LSI SandForce 2281 SSD Flash Processor used in Agility 3. The advantage of using the Indinlix is that the read/write speed of compressible as well as incompressible data is almost same.

The SSD drive is nicely designed, lightweight and heat, noise & shock resistant. We ran a couple of tests over the SSD to check its performance. In HD Tune benchmark test, it registered an average transfer rate of 143.1MB/sec with the excellent access time of 0.2 ms. Also, it showed a burst rate of 43.0 MB/sec with the CPU usage of 2.9%. In the AS SSD Compression benchmark test, the average read & write rate was about 260 MB/sec & 250 MB/sec respectively. It got an excellent cumulative score of 602 for overall read/write benchmark test.

If we compare this drive with Kingston 128 GB SATA III (reviewed in Feb'2012 issue of PCQ), we find that Kingston SSD has almost similar read rate (270 MB/sec) but slightly lower write rate (222 MB/sec). Agility 4 gets a marginal edge over Kingston in the AS SSD benchmark test which had a score of 548.

Bottomline: If you're looking for an SSD with an excellent price performance ratio then you should definitely give this drive a try.