esoteriic.com

OCZ AGT3-25SAT3-120G Agility 3 120GB SATA III 2.5 inch SSD

[tech review]

I purchased this drive with the hope that will decrease the horrendous loading times I was having with a game. It is working as expected. It has helped on a number of fronts which is an added bonus too, although unintentional. Loading times have greatly decreased as expected. Naturally I suspect that the game hasn't exactly been written in the best way it could be but the game is now much more playable after upgrading.

Naturally, you have to pay a premium for speed versus storage. If you require faster loading times than an SSD will fix that problem. So far, I am pleased with this drive's performance. No major complaints and not much else I can see. It is worth noting that a cable is not included in the box.

The following is a list of points that you may find useful:

Software/ Drivers
No need to install drivers. No bloatware as SATA 3 is point-to-point like a USB drive. Just have to plug it in and it works.

Connectivity
This drive does not come with a cable so you will need to buy it extra. I had a spare one from my motherboard when I bought this computer 5 years ago. I think it may only be a SATA 2 cable but it works. New motherboards should be SATA 3 and may even have a spare SATA 3 cable. It is worth checking in advance although there is backwards compatibility.

Speed
Fast! Even though I'm only using it as a SATA 2 drive it is still much faster than the old style hard drive. I bought a 3rd generation drive as I intend to upgrade my computer sometime this year. Note that the box says 6Gb/s speed (or similar), this relates to the max data transfer speed between drive and the motherboard but not the read/write speed. Also note that SATA 2 is "only" 3 Gb/s.

Set up
There is minimal set up required. Apart from the physical installation which requires a spare SATA cable and a spare power lead, Window will auto-detect this drive. What you need to do is format it and assign it a drive letter in order to make it work. You can do this by going to (My) Computer > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk management. Right click on the SSD drive. Modern windows uses the NTFS format. You should see that even though the drive is advertised as 120gb it will never quite be exactly 120, my drive is 110.