Intel 320 vs OCZ Agility 3

[Ryker]

Basically, this is my first time buying an SSD drive and I want to use it as the OS/system disk. I'll be getting a new computer and the motherboard supports SATA III. Having said that, I can't decide between getting the Intel 320 series or the OCZ Agility 3 one. As far as the first is concerned, I heard good things about its reliability, whereas I've heard some bad stuff about the OCZ's SSD's. On the other hand, Agility 3 would use SATA III, whereas Intel 320 wouldn't. OCZ also seems to perform better.

Yeah, I don't know, do you guys have any advice here?

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

The Intel® SSD 320 drives are the most reliable SSDs on the market. They are also the only SSD that comes with a 5 year warranty. While they are only SATA II the performance that they offer is very good for a SATA II drive. For additional information on the Intel SSD 320 you can check this out http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/320series/overview.htm.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[JohnnyLucky]

IntelEnthusiast is correct. In terms of synthetic benchmarks, the Intel 320 is not a speed demon. However, in real world applications, the 320 can defnitely hold it's own.

Hope you have some spare time. Here's a link to the ssd database where you'll find no less than 11 links to technical reviews of the Intel 320 series solid state drives:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Just scroll down to the Intel ssd section.

 

[tecmo34]

^+1... Intel 320 GB is a very solid drive.

Let me propose a third option, which is the Crucial m4 128 GB. It is the best of both worlds at this price point. 1) Gives your SATA II speeds & 2) Is a reliable drive compared to the OCZ Agility 3.

 

[clonazepam]

Well the latest news being that the intel 320 series apparently have that bug where if you have an unexpected loss of power it could revert to a storage capacity of 8 MB.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-bug-ssd-320-series,13076.html

Also, I just received my 120gb ocz agility 3 today and I am far from pleased. I set it up as a secondary drive. It arrived with older firmware 2.06. Every time I try to update the firmware, the system blue-screens. I put it into another computer and installed a fresh copy of windows 7 onto it. It seemed to work fine. I still have yet figured out how to get the firmware updated b/c that only works when its not the system drive. So... as of this moment, I am installing windows to a maxtor drive, and maybe from that fresh install I can get the firmware updated but Im not very hopeful. If this doesn't work out I'm going back to my raptors in raid 0 and going to wait some more before adopting ssd. My system is an older nvidia chipset board so your mileage may vary. Buy one but dont expect it to work, so that way, if it does, you'll feel much better.

Edit: Finally got the firmware updated after like 23 tries. The system didnt BSOD until about 5 milliseconds after the update completed. Trying the secure erase feature in the ocz tool still causes a complete meltdown, bsod. My system's old so I expected a lot of trouble. I needed something new to play with until I get a new build (see signature).

The new patriot wildfires are on sale on the egg though a 120gb model costs $300 about 20 dollars more than the vertex 3 max iops.

Good luck in whatever you choose.

 

[tokencode]

Take a look at the OCZ Revodrives as well - PCIe card SSDs

 

[Ryker]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I went with the Intel and got the 120GB 320 series SSD. Hopefully it's going to serve me well

 

[crazieglued]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I went with the Intel and got the 120GB 320 series SSD. Hopefully it's going to serve me well

Great choice, as that is the model I chose! For testing purposes i first ran the drive in my "big box". AMD phenom black 965 4 gigs ram gigabyte mobo etc. WOW it was fast... Then I dropped it in my sony vaio vpceg with an I5 sandybridge 2430M 4 gigs ram... :: HEAD EXPLODED:: PS from what I researched back in the day when i got this drive you should not defrag as it means RMA-ville.

Cheers! E