OCZ pitches 'best value' SLC SSD

Better performance than MLC drives

By Tony Smith, 27th August 2009

OCZ claims is latest solid-state drive is the most cost-effective model based on speedy single-layer cell (SLC) Flash technology.

Most SSDs on sale today of any significant capacity use cheaper but slower multi-layer cell (MLC) Flash to deliver storage of between 64GB and 256GB at reasonable - but still more than hard drive - prices.

Price is key: OCZ's new Agility EX costs $399 (£246/€280) but offers a raw storage capacity of just 64GB. Its sustained read and write speeds are 255MB/s and 195MB/s, respectively, which aren't any better - less in some cases - than the speediest MLC SSDs on the market, including ones from OCZ.

But SLC technology should deliver much better random write performance, the one area in which SSDs are weak. Alas, OCZ didn't provide relevant performance claims, so we'll have to wait for independent tests to see just how faster this Agility EX is. ®

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Posted Friday 28th August 2009 11:00 GMT

Des

How fast?

That's a great transfer rate; I just rebuilt my PC at home using two 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black (7200rpm and 32MB cache) in RAID0 and I short-stroked them (created a 256GB partition) and get 175MB/s. Plus I bet my access time of 9.3ms gets blown away by the SSD; I only have a USB flash ReadyBoost flash drive, but that manages 0.5ms!