OCZ Releases 180GB and 360GB Models of Agility 3
by Kristian Vättö on February 29, 2012 3:52 PM ESTToday OCZ added two more capacities to their Agility 3 lineup: 180GB and 360GB. Agility 3 isn't the first SSD series to feature such SSD capacities, but more often we see 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB SandForce based SSDs. However, making a 180GB or 360GB SSD isn't any more difficult. The SF-2281 controller supports up to eight channels but it can also run in 6-channel mode and that's how you make 180GB and 360GB drives.
Remember that SandForce drives use about 7% for over-provisioning by default plus possibly RAISE as well depending on the SSD. Hence these SSDs have 192GiB and 384GiB of actual NAND in them. 2.5" drives usually have 16 NAND packages but to run in 6-channel mode, you only use 12 packages (i.e. two NAND packages per channel). For the 180GB model, that means twelve 16GiB NAND packages with two 8GiB dies per package. 360GB simply doubles the dies per NAND package so you have twelve 32GiB packages with four dies each.
| Specifications of New Agility 3 SSDs | ||
| Capacity | 180GB | 360GB |
| Raw NAND Capacity | 192GiB | 384GiB |
| Controller | SandForce SF-2281 | |
| NAND Type | Asynchronous 25nm MLC | |
| Sequential Read | 525MB/s | 525MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 500MB/s | 495MB/s |
| 4KB Random Read | 35K IOPS | 35K IOPS |
| 4KB Random Write | 50K IOPS | 25K IOPS |
| Price | 19,000 Yen ($237) | 36,000 Yen ($448) |
Even though only six channels are used, there is no performance loss according to the specs. Read speed is the same for all Agility 3 drives but write speed is dependent on the capacity: low and high capacity drives have worse write performance than the medium capacities. This is why the 180GB model is faster in writes than the 360GB model.
The new capacities have already been listed by some retailers and the 180GB seems to go for around $225 while the 360GB is listed at $425. The price per GB is about the same as what other Agility 3 drives offer, so these are viable options if you're looking for something in between 120GB and 240GB or 240GB and 480GB models.
Sources: Hermitage Akihabara, OCZ
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estarkey7 - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link
I had a Vertex2 in my laptop and the drive was screaming fast! It only lasted for about two weeks before it would stutter every five minutes before the drive was no longer recognizable.I have worked as an Electronic Technician earlier in my career and I know some stuff does fail, no big deal.
After receiving a replacement and going through the drive partitioning, duplication and alignment process - all was well, for about two weeks!
I dumped it on ebay for half of what I paid.
I don't care how fast a drive is, it has to be reliable. It seems as if they did very little audit on the product as they figured that we love OCZ so much we'd be happy to perform that duty for them with our invaluable data.
Just ordered a Crucial M4 128GB for a desktop system boot drive and think I will have terrific performance and reliability if NewEgg's forums are to be believed!
Laststop311 - Saturday, March 3, 2012 - link
The only Sandforce 2281 controller containing SSD that is 100% stable is the intel 520 series SSD that Intel made custom firmware for that took over a year to be finished.Much better off getting a crucial M4 256GB for 310 dollars now at tigerdirect. Plus the crucial m4 has the best 4k random read performance of all ssd's currently on the market. Random 4k read is what makes you boot up faster and load programs faster. It's really the most important spec and Crucial dominates that statistic. They are also near the top for random write performance too.
Owls - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Is extra.* BSODs and other issues are included free of charge*Must purchase a Samsung or Intel 320 drive
Crazyeyeskillah - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
I have 2 vertex 3's in raid 0 and have had no issue with anything, other than reminding myself to make reasons to get up from my computer since i don't have the waiting time to go pee pee or smoke some rock.I've never had a crash, bsod, or any other issue related to the drives. some people are really stupid and brick their drives all the time. they put them into sleep mode, they unplug and plug them back in on different boards, and so on. Stupid people = stupid results.
I did have a bad VERTEX LIMITED awhile back and they next day aired me a replacement from the other side of the planet. It literally took 16 hours to get here from Taiwan. I'd like to see the shipping check on that one. If it breaks, they fix it, stop your bitching. Just buy an intel, oh wait, it's out of your budget range. . .
AnandReader1999 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Helped a friend of mine spec out a system just before the Vertex Series 3 hit. He got a good price on a Vertex 2. Lastest bios, etc.It lasted a couple of months before the first BSOD. Continued updates for Bios (and Motherboard, etc) and still had the problem. Several drive replacements later and multiple (Can't see it even in BIOS issues) and he got fed up and replaced it with the latest Intel SSD drive. Company he bought the drive from told him the same thing he found out the hard way. Massive problems with SSD's. He's using all top end components, Intel, Asus, etc. Nothing overclocked.
He had so many BSOD's that he made an image and was back up in running in record times. Thank god I had him spec out a standard 2TB enterprise level drive for all the games/data. Just the core system on the OCZ 240GB Vertex 2.
darrellj48 - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
I just wanted to debunk the bad stories I have read about these SSD's. I have three of them one has been in use for about a year and the second and third ones for just over 6 months. All three have performed flawlessly since day one. The first one (60Gb) is in a Toshiba Qosmio 18.4 inch i7 Gaming Laptop as an OS drive and the others (360 GB) as an OS/APP drive, and a (120 GB) Photoshop scratch drive are in an AMD XF i7 graphics workstation. All three of these drives have been outstanding from the time they were installed. Though SSD's are not generally recommended as scratch drives I just did this one as an experiment. So far it has performed well and I can't see any reason not to use them for this application. However it has only been in use for just over six months now. After about a year or so I will have a better idea of how good it is for this kind of use so far nothing to complain about.