OCZ Agility 3 - Buy or Avoid?

[MightyJordan]

I've been looking into getting an SSD for a while, now someone I know's offered me a 120GB OCZ Agility 3 for around ?50, so obviously I'm tempted. Is it a good buy though? I've read a few SSD guides online before, and the summary of them was to stick to either the Crucial M4 or the Samsung 830. Would it be best for me to keep waiting and go with either of those instead?

The other concern I have with buying an SSD is cloning my drive over to it. My current system HDD is 1TB, so obviously, I'd have to create a second partition on it, and then go back-and-forth moving files over and decreasing the main partition size until it's small enough to fit on the SSD, but would it be safe if I cloned my system to an SSD? My friend recommended doing a fresh install onto the SSD, but I don't really fancy going through all the hassle of setting everything up and installing everything again unless it's absolutely necessary. Also, I recently did the upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 8 Pro (x64), so I'm not sure if I'd be able to use my serial key again if I had to.

Sorry for all the questions, but thanks in advance to anyone who can answer them.

[Noir Angel]

I own one, and despite what the OCZ haters say it's been a very reliable drive so far. Granted it doesn't have the raw performance of the Vertex 4 or Samsung 8 series but it's still a very good drive for the price. I wouldn't clone from a mechanical drive to an SSD however I would personally advise doing a fresh install as Windows has to configure itself for optimal running on an SSD and I believe it does that upon install.

[Astra.Xtreme]

More than likely it will be fine, but it is risky since it runs on SandForce. Honestly, you might as well play it safe and buy a brand new Agility 4 or Vertex 4. I don't think it will be too big of a price difference and then you'll get a warranty with it.

[f0rk_b0mb]

Avoid anything OCZ. They just laid of a bunch of people and are going down probably soon. I have a Vertex 3 and it's good---faster than an HDD, and I'm happy with it, but it could be better. Get the Samsung 830. Don't clone the drive!!! Do a fresh install!!!

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

I have a Samsung 830 128GB and a OCZ Vertex 2 60GB, both of them are fast, yes, but the 830 is ton better.

[Noir Angel]

The Vertex 2 is a SATAII drive, the Samsung 830 is a SATA III drive, of course it's going to be faster.

[Astra.Xtreme]

Avoid anything OCZ. They just laid of a bunch of people and are going down probably soon.

OCZ isn't going anywhere. Restructuring is a good thing when the market is down. The Vertex is their prized product and is arguably the best SSD on the market, so you can only expect it to get better since they will be focusing more on it.

[mr_sock_00]

If you goto OCZ warranty site, there's option asking if this is your "1st RMA, 2nd RMA, 3rd RMA".

I'm on my 2nd RMA after one died after 3 months and another one dead on arrival.

But Agility and Vertex is their flagship line so it has better chance of working well. But the long term reliability, I'm not willing to risk.

In the meantime, I bought a Kingston Hyper X and it was rated 7.2/7.9 on the windows scale. It is working super good right now.

[tsupersonic]

Definitely avoid OCZ - I have personally had a failure 4 months after I purchased my Vertex, and a few other of my friends had their Vertex2/3's fail. For a company that just switched to making just SSD's, they sure suck at it. They also move the largest amount of drives because they're cheap pieces of ****. I would stick with Samsung 830, or Crucial M4 or Intel SSD's.

[Noir Angel]

I've had my drive for almost a year now and not so much as a sniff of a reliability issue so far. I guess some are more lucky than others.

[articuno1au]

Any decent SSD is an enormous improvement over HDDs.

I had an OCZ Vertex 2, Agility 3 and now a Vertex 4. I'm happy with all of them and would suggest them readily enough :)

For 50 pound, worth it imo.

[ToneKnee]

Been running my Agility 3 for 6 months without issue now.

[jamieakers]

If you have to ask the question you probably want to avoid them.

[Noir Angel]

One other point to note: The Agility 3 doesn't come with a mounting bracket for a 3.5 inch drive slot so you may need to acquire one separately ;)

If you have to ask the question you probably want to avoid them.

I disagree, this thread on it's own seems to show how polarised people are, often it depends on whose opinions you ask. And I find the best opinions come from people to have used the products.

[threetonesun]

The 4 series isn't much more, and has a better controller.

[mr_sock_00]

Do a Google search on OCZ products and see for yourself, not just the people here who used OCZ <1 year or the first product they bought.

And how valuable is your data? In fairness, I think Vertex is their best SSD product though.

[IceBreakerG]

I have a 240GB Agility 3 in my MacBook Pro (dual booting Windows 7 on it too), and it's been very reliable so far. It's faster than anything I've ever owned, so I wouldn't know how much faster other drives would be (or if it's even a noticeable difference), but I believe the newest firmware fixed any reliability issues it may have had.

[Astra.Xtreme]

I have a 240GB Agility 3 in my MacBook Pro (dual booting Windows 7 on it too), and it's been very reliable so far. It's faster than anything I've ever owned, so I wouldn't know how much faster other drives would be (or if it's even a noticeable difference), but I believe the newest firmware fixed any reliability issues it may have had.

This. As long as you have the latest firmware on the 3 Series, you'll be fine. If you get the 4 Series, you won't have to worry about anything since it uses Indilinx, which is super reliable. Plus a 5 year warranty.

Obviously this all depends on who you talk to. I've build about 50 PCs for a client, many of which with an OCZ SSD. Haven't had a single failure yet with those. I've seen one failure, and it was a Kingston, but I wouldn't say Kingston is less reliable than anything else.

[tsupersonic]

I disagree, this thread on it's own seems to show how polarised people are, often it depends on whose opinions you ask. And I find the best opinions come from people to have used the products.

Every product has failures - that's unavoidable. But, OCZ just has high failure rates, and that should be enough as a consumer to sway you away. Why gamble with a product like an SSD? You're storing information, and it's an inconvenience if it fails. In either case, backup your data regardless of the brand. OCZ's tend to be slightly cheaper than the competition, but I would buy Intel, Crucial, Samsung for a few $ more. Having used an OCZ drive, and seeing it fail (amongst my friends') does not put a good reputation of them in my mind.

[threetonesun]

But, OCZ just has high failure rates, and that should be enough as a consumer to sway you away. Why gamble with a product like an SSD?

Do you have more than anecdotal proof of this? OCZ has been selling cheap SSDs for a long time, I would expect there to be a fair number of failures. But is it really greater than other drive companies by volume sold? It's hard to say.

Unless someone can point to an actual manufacturing flaw, like the IBM Deathstars, it's hard to say they're actually worse.

[articuno1au]

There was a noteworthy flaw in the Sandforce chip firmware that made the drives unreliable and glitchy.

That's more than fixed. It was fixed more than a year ago..

[torrentthief]

any modern ssd is fast as hell, way better than your mechanical hdd. Samsung do appear to overall be the best at the moment though.

[Noir Angel]

Every product has failures - that's unavoidable. But, OCZ just has high failure rates, and that should be enough as a consumer to sway you away. Why gamble with a product like an SSD? You're storing information, and it's an inconvenience if it fails. In either case, backup your data regardless of the brand. OCZ's tend to be slightly cheaper than the competition, but I would buy Intel, Crucial, Samsung for a few $ more. Having used an OCZ drive, and seeing it fail (amongst my friends') does not put a good reputation of them in my mind.

I only use my SSD as a boot drive, all my integral data is stored on mechanical drives so I'm covered on that front, but I've simply not seen anything that tells me using an OCZ drive is a risk. The firmware issues that caused the failures have been fixed as articuno1au pointed out, I know signs of disk failures, I update my firmware for products as soon as it's released and I'm careful. I've never seen evidence that owning an OCZ drive is a bigger risk than any other, you'll always get the odd failure, it's just part of the risk of comupting.

[mollick2]

I have yet to have an issue with any of the four OCZ drives I have. My Vertex 2 is two years old, Vertex 3 just over a year and two Vertex 4s are a few months old.

OCZ has the highest failure rates, but its negligible (last time I checked they were within half a percent from Intel). The failure rates of mechanical drives are astronomical in comparison.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

Every product has failures - that's unavoidable. But, OCZ just has high failure rates, and that should be enough as a consumer to sway you away. Why gamble with a product like an SSD? You're storing information, and it's an inconvenience if it fails. In either case, backup your data regardless of the brand. OCZ's tend to be slightly cheaper than the competition, but I would buy Intel, Crucial, Samsung for a few $ more. Having used an OCZ drive, and seeing it fail (amongst my friends') does not put a good reputation of them in my mind.

As I like to say... If you didn't have a backup then it wasn't important.