Agility 3 240GB...

I'm in the market for a 240/256gb SSD. Its going into a SATA II laptop but will eventually go into a SATA III interface.

I'd be willing to get a Vertex 2 or gen 1 sandforce drive but I can't find any for 250-300. The agility 3 is 290 shipped on amazon so that seems like a pretty decent deal.

I also would consider the C300 or M4 but both those again are running around 375.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this drive? It seemed to fair pretty well especially for its cost.

The only issue is compatibility problems with the controller, which the Vertex 3 is infamous for. They're supposed to be fixed with the latest firmware, but I wouldn't want to deal with them. That's why the drive is so incredibly cheap these days.

Seems to be the case that if you get it and it works, it'll keep working. You can always roll the dice - a lot of people do just fine. Sketches me out, though.

The other option is to regularly rummage through our delightful classifieds section!

I'm not saying that the Agility 3 is a bad drive. Its low price is because it is actually a Vertex 2 with a Sandforce 2xxx controller which is SATA3. The Vertex 2 uses the Sandforce 1xxx controller (SATA2). However the Agility 3 and Vertex 2 use the same asynchronous NAND.

So if you plug the Agility 3 into a SATA2 port the performance would be identical to that of a Vertex 2. The Agility 3's SATA3 credentials will only come into play if you normally use highly compressible data sets, which is very unlikely in real world use, or you benchmark the drive with ATTO.

That said, if the Agility 3 is about the same price as the Vertex 2 then get the Agility 3.

So if you plug the Agility 3 into a SATA2 port the performance would be identical to that of a Vertex 2.

Click to expand...

That would surprise me. Random read/write performance should be much better thanks to the improved controller. SATA II vs SATA III is only going to impact peak data transfer rates, which for most random operations should be well below SATA II speeds.