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OCZ’s Agility 2 120GB is a new generation of drive based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller. Unlike the OCZ Vertex LE and OCZ Vertex 2 drives, the Agility 2′s SandForce controller has an IOP limit artificially limited in firmware. With that being said, it is also cheaper than the Vertex 2 120GB and is still a very fast SSD, especially with compressible loads.

The short story of the SandForce controller is that it uses an internal encryption/ compression algorithm to write data to NAND faster than other drives. The SandForce based Agility 2 120GB is therefore fairly fast with compressed workloads (i.e. pictures, music files, zip files, ISOs, and etc) and much faster with compressible workloads such as office documents. Another major storyline is that SandForce is a fairly new player and the controllers are of unknown reliability. Finally, originally SandForce reserved much more space on drives in this capacity range for use in wear leveling, cache and etc. OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 SandForce drives were originally 100GB but after being criticized for mediocre cost per GB and with little performance penalty moving from 28GB reserved (old drives were 100GB usable 28GB reserved) to 8GB reserved (new drives are 120GB usable 8GB reserved), the choice to enable the extra capacity was clear.

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A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

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