The OCZ Agility 3 SSD offers an incredible throughput, it excels in IOPs performance and in fact remains close to it's bigger brother the Vertex 3. For typical desktop workloads , the Agility 3 is cheaper than the Vertex 3 and it should do the job for you. If you start mixing in data that's not easily compressed by the SandForce controller, the Agility will not offer the write/read speeds quoted by OCZ .

When we look at the results, it is clear that the Agility 3 has a high IOPS performance, although in some of the synthetic tests was delivering significantly lower performance with incompressible data bandwidth. Sequential performance from the SandForce series 2200 controller is fantastic and the 4k results are really great.

The new 25 nm NAND and the selection of the series 2200 SandForce controller offer peak values of 500 MB/sec during read/write, making the previous generation of SSDs look extremely slow. Of course, there has been a lot of discussion lately on the 25nm NAND Flash memory versus SSD lifespan. Although we cannot come with any safe conclusions on that, we believe that it should not be worrying at least for normal consumer usage. The Agility 3 also features more affordable asynchronous NAND than the Vertex 3, which makes the latter more durable and gives an edge in terms of peak performance. However, the Vertex 3 240GB will cost you $560, which is almost $100 more than what you have to spend for the Agility 3 240GB SSD.

The Agility 3 240GB SSD offers a dynamic performance envelope which includes extremely high read/write speeds under light/typical desktop usage. If you are after performance in the storage then look no further.