OCZ's Agility 2 Reviewed: The First SF-1200 with MP Firmware
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 21, 2010 7:22 PM ESTOCZ's Agility 2 and the SF-1200
Relegating Indilinx to the bottom of the pyramid for now is a bold move for OCZ. Considering how much business OCZ has given Indilinx over the past year I don’t expect that they are very happy over this move.
SandForce’s architecture is on a different level from what we’ve seen from Indilinx. While the Vertex could be viewed as an Intel alternative, OCZ’s Vertex 2 and Agility 2 are designed to offer better-than-Intel performance and as such they actually command a higher dollar-per-GB rate.
Both the Vertex 2 and Agility 2 are based on SandForce’s SF-1200 controller. I’ve described the differences between this and the SF-1500 in detail here. It boils down to a bunch of enterprise class features missing and lower sustained small file random write speed on the SF-1200 vs. the 1500.
The Vertex 2 retains the small file random write performance of the SF-1500, while the Agility 2 is a standard SF-1200 implementation. According to SandForce, the Agility 2 is representative of how all other SF-1200 based SSDs will perform using the 1200’s current mass production firmware (more on this later).
Note the missing super cap, that's a feature of enterprise SF-1500 designs
OCZ sent in their Agility 2 for review, arguably the more interesting of the two since we already have an idea of how the Vertex 2 will perform. Similar to previous Agility drives, the new A2 shaves a small amount off the retail price of the Vertex 2 in exchange for lower performance:
| OCZ SandForce Drive Pricing (MSRP) | |||||
| 50GB | 100GB | 200GB | |||
| OCZ Agility 2 | $204.99 | $379.99 | $719.99 | ||
| OCZ Vertex 2 | $219.99 | $399.99 | $769.99 | ||
The Agility 2 ships with a 2.5" to 3.5" drive sled for use in desktops. If you use this sled the SATA ports won't line up with drive trays in systems like the Mac Pro.
Inside the drive itself we find SandForce’s SF-1200 controller and no external DRAM. SandForce’s architecture attempts to solve the issue of NAND write amplification by simply writing less to the drive through compression/deduplication techniques. With less data to keep track of, a large external DRAM isn’t necessary - assuming the data being written is easily reduced by SandForce’s algorithms.
SandForce also claims that its reduced write amplification could enable the use of cheaper NAND on these drives. It’s an option that some manufacturers may take however OCZ has committed to using the same quality of NAND as it has in the past. The Agility 2 uses 34nm IMFT NAND, presumably similar to what’s used in Intel’s X25-M G2.
The Agility 2 sample OCZ sent had the first SF-1200 mass production firmware (v3.0.5) from SandForce on it with full TRIM support. The Agility 2 should begin shipping to etailers later this month.
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Look09 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
What happens when you use TrueCrypt to encrypt your OS.? Does it then random-write everything and indilinx is better? Does it make the Vertex 2 much better? Or no difference? ReplyRyan Smith - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Encrypted data should look like random noise, and as a result should have very little compressibility. I haven't used TrueCrypt, but it's my understanding that it writes garbage data to whatever part of the hidden partition isn't in use, so the whole thing should largely be uncompressible and match our random data performance. Replysemo - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I'm interested in encrypted testing also. These controllers are beginning to look like very fast consumer drives rather than enterprise (if the SATA interface wasn't a big enough hint already).I'm also wondering why are they getting a more substantial performance hit when writing compressed random 4k writes compared to 2MB sequential writes (74.4% vs 57.4%).
Just to re instate, why are all these SSD makers coming out with SATA drives and calling them enterprise? AFAIK, Intel and Hitachi are working on an SAS SSD but I'm not aware of any other reasonable company doing the same (i'm totally ignoring what the military might have because costs there are nuts). Reply
Mugur - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
... Too bad that the price is still high so I'm very interested for the low-end 40 GB ones, but with good random 4k writes. I have 5 machines at home waiting for this upgrade as the boot drive. :-)Allow me to thank you, Anand, for your dedication and work. Reply
poeticjustic - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
That was a really helpful and thorough article. Thank you for all this info.a few things that i wanted to ask.
-On the random read/write speed page and specifically on the 4k aligned random write, we don't see anywhere the intel x25-E performance. Obviously that is because the testing of the x25-E was performed in the past, when this kind of test wasn't performed. Is it safe to assume that the performance of the x25-E would be quite close to that of the 4k random write test (around 48MB/s)?? Since we see that mostly the new controllers are mostly affected.
-Furthermore, at least from what i've seen on eshops around in my country, the price of the z-drive m84 250GB and 500Gb has come closer to that of sata ssds. Still they are more expensive of course, but wouldn't it be a good idea to start seeing some z-drive performance on those tables for a direct comparison with the ssds and see whether the difference in their performance is bigger than the difference in their price? Just a thought.
Making an extra remark on the performance of SF controller during already compressed data plus the the random data perormance table was a pretty important addition and something we should pay attention to.
Thank you once again for a well built article. Reply
eaw999 - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
correct, the x25-e, like -m, isn't affected drastically by alignment. you can expect slightly higher numbers with alignment, but nothing jaw-dropping. on the other hand, the x25-e positively rips at random writes at high queue depths, but that's not something you're likely to see often in desktop usage. Replykrazyderek - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
When does this ever happen? isn't that sentence an oxymorron, the only thing i can think of it if you were installing several applications at the same time? and it would depend on the applications being installed too, since i think i remember hearing that games are very sequential now Replykrazyderek - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I DO see the importance when dealing with pre-compressed files like pictures and videos, i agree it would be nice to see a 0% 50% and 100% compressed figures to give people a good overview of things, but still, when would you see highly random sequential data? Replyzdzichu - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
Sequentially speaks about data access pattern, highly random is about data itself. It is perfect description of writing movie to a disk - you are storing byte-by-byte and each byte is probably different that preceeding ones. Replyzdzichu - Thursday, April 22, 2010 - link
I think you can skip non-aligned test in future. It is a corner case, not interesting at all. Reply