OCZ Agility 3 SSD review - SSD Performance Atto Disk Benchmark

Atto Disk Benchmark

One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. I love it to death as it is so reliable and produces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

ATTO Read performance

But let's have a peek at actual read performance. The SandForce-1200 controllers based SSDs kicks ass and definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark. But the Agility 3 has that SandForce 2200 series controller over the SATA 6G interface and look at it take go, indeed reaching advertised speeds.

The red line is the Agility 3, orange is the Vertex 3 and yellow is the 'older' Vertex 2.

For bold comparison to a FAST HDD we include the Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is considered amongst the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. Its read/write performance is very good for a traditional/mechanical HDD of course. So bare in mind that your generic HDD is quite a bit slower.

ATTO Write performance

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit is... writing really small files fast, so let's start off there and have a look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4KB block sizes to 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 256MB with a queue depth of 4 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them.