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OCZ Agility 2 Solid State Drive

I recently got a solid state drive for my computer. It is amazing. The new generation of SSD's that just game out with the Sandforce controller are really fast. Using the ATTO benchmarking tool I am seeing about 273 MB/s write speed and 283 MB/s read speeds. Sandforce makes enterprise level solid state equipment, but just recently released their new controller, the SF-1500, to a handful of companies such as OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, and G.Skill.

I picked up a 60Gb Agility 2 which I am using as my active boot partition with Windows 7x64. It boots up incredibly quickly. Installing software is a snap and programs open instantaneously. I provisioned the drive as 50GB, which comes out to about 46GB of usable space which should be plenty for all of the OS files and my applications, as well as a few games. With the MLC (multi-level cell) flash memory the cells can go bad over time, so by leaving an extra 10gb of free space on the drive that is not partitioned it should allow the drive to last longer. It is actually a 64GB drive, with 4GB dedicated to over-provisioning, but by leaving an additional 10GB free it leaves 14GB available for over-provisioning.

I could see these drives becoming valuable for database servers and web servers, as the access time is 1/10th of a millisecond and they can perform between 10,000 and 50,000 4K random IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). Since database servers and web servers perform many small file operations they would probably see the most performance gain. Of course, in an enterprise environment it would be prudent to go with SLC (single-level cell) flash memory instead of MLC.