SDD - I didit

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Newegg had a great  price on a 120Mb OCZ Agility 2 as their mid day shell shocker deal so I pulled the trigger. 
It was less than I paid for my first 20Gb drive but still....

The Agility 2, which is the cheaper OCZ SDD seemed to benchmark pretty good against the more expensive Vertix (sp?), looks like they made some hardware changes that really pepped it up. Now to see if this one has them.
But I doubt if I'd even notice.
Keep me in your prayers....
BTW, the hardware change is mostly the switch to the Sandforce controller.

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Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Topic: SDD - I didit Posted: 28 Jul 2010 at 12:29pm
	Newegg had a great price on a 120Mb OCZ Agility 2 as their mid day shell shocker deal so I pulled the trigger. It was less than I paid for my first 20Gb drive but still.... The Agility 2, which is the cheaper OCZ SDD seemed to benchmark pretty good against the more expensive Vertix (sp?), looks like they made some hardware changes that really pepped it up. Now to see if this one has them. But I doubt if I'd even notice. Keep me in your prayers.... BTW, the hardware change is mostly the switch to the Sandforce controller.

Karl_db Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 29262	Quote Reply Posted: 28 Jul 2010 at 4:07pm
	Sounds like a candidate for another article or review...

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 28 Jul 2010 at 4:13pm
	For that they should send me a couple of eval units.

Randy Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Location: USA, Georgia Posts: 15255	Quote Reply Posted: 28 Jul 2010 at 9:28pm
	Don - I sure hope when you test these waters you see a nice bump in performance.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 29 Jul 2010 at 4:52am
	If I don't see a bump it's because I've not installed it correctly....

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 5:07am
	It's in and running with no errors. I didn't run any benchmarks, there are loads of those all over the place and besides, a benchmark is worthless to me if it doesn't "feel" a lot faster. I was hoping for that same hit that I got when I went from floppies to hard drive but while there is a big improvement it's just not the same. Don't get me wrong, it's faster, everything is probably close to twice as fast, and I expect if I didn't have the experience the floppy to hard drive experience it'd be one of those moments. I know I said no benchmarks but I did rerun the Windows Experience index which went from 5.9 on the Raptor to 7.2 on the Agility. I haven't yet looked around for any Agility/Windows 7 tweaks, there may be additional tweaks I can apply so all this is straight out of the box.

Karl_db Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 29262	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 5:18am
	Good news it's working well! I guess computers are like drugs...or roller coasters and such....it takes a bigger and bigger hit to get that same "rush". I've had a few of those.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 5:38am
	It is only a mid-range performer but I was price restricted.... Still not bad and no shadowcopy, etc. errors. Always get a little "unrelaxed" when I clone a drive.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 7:11am
	First tweak. I was running the SATA channels in IDE mode vs. ACHI mode. Made a change to the registry, switched from IDE to ACHI mode in the BIOS, rebooted, Windows installed new drivers and now the experience index for the drive is a 7.7. Sure enough it's like anything else, have to look in 3 million places to find all the details. Sheesh, would have been nice if they'd included that info with the drive. Next is to flash the drive with the latest firmware. Tried to do that in IDE mode and for a while I thought I'd bricked it.

Karl_db Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 29262	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 7:25am
	I've thought about trying that hack...to switch to ACHI...with the desktop. But you know what they say....cowardice is the better part of valor.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 7:51am
	It was a slam dunk, just the registry change, the reboot, BIOS change and then 7 automagically installed the new drivers and another reboot and that was it. The search "Gatherer" complained with a couple of warnings in the event viewer but that was it and it seemed to fix itself.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 8:14am
	After switching to ACHI I was able to update the firmware with no problem. Didn't even have to do anything funny to get it back like I did after I flashed it in IDE mode. Always interesting to see what you find when you start looking in new areas. The first is Smartmontools and the second is the Windows "fsutil" command line utility which I had forgotten about. Now to go study TRIM. I can't quite figure out if it works automatically with this drive and Windows 7.

Randy Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Location: USA, Georgia Posts: 15255	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 8:20am
	Glad to see it's still a nice bump in speed. Maybe it would be more noticeable while using different applications? Started to change to AHCI mode to enable hot swapping, but found it more useful to boot off the drive in the tray. I really should try out a second tray. Sure would make backups easier.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 8:25am
	If my external eSATA thingie wasn't already packed I'd try it out as in the past I had to reboot in order for it to be recognized. I'm always wondering if this might solve the data corruption problems I had back when I first installed 7? I'd try it but my extra drive rails have been packed away too.... This house is so "staged" that it's like no one lives here.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 8:37am
	Probably a better one than Smartoolsmon: CrystalDiskInfo

Randy Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Location: USA, Georgia Posts: 15255	Quote Reply Posted: 31 Jul 2010 at 11:56am
	That's one of 2 I've been seeing talked about. The other one is MHDD, but it can't be used on the same physical IDE channel.

Karl_db Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 29262	Quote Reply Posted: 25 Jan 2011 at 5:22pm
	What size drive did you say it was? (I was re-reading the thread...120Mb seems a tad small....) (And 120GB SSD drives seem a tad expensive...LOL)

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 26 Jan 2011 at 4:54am
	120. The Raptor was kinda smallish as well and I keep all my big files on a conventional drive so I end up with about 50% free. It wasn't cheap but it's lower end on the performance front, it was a Newegg shell shocker and there was even a MIR so it didn't beat me up too bad.

Karl_db Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 29262	Quote Reply Posted: 26 Jan 2011 at 3:15pm
	Maybe some day. LOL Although I think if it was an "either or" choice....I'd go with putting one in the laptop before the desktop.

Don Watkins Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Admin Group Admin Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 22195	Quote Reply Posted: 26 Jan 2011 at 3:30pm
	I keep an eye out for a cheap one for the laptop as I think I'd use it more often if it didn't take 20 minutes to load a program or a file but still waiting....