14 DAY TRIAL // OCZ has been quite aggressive on both the storage, as well as the memory market lately. In fact, the company unveiled a variety of DDR3 memory kits, flash drives (with or without USB 3.0 support) and, of course, solid state drives. End-users will also likely know that SandForce controllers have proven very popular among storage solutions developers. As such, it would not really be surprising to learn that OCZ itself plans to continue using it in its future products.
SandForce controllers are known for the significant read and write speeds that they can give an SSD. This speed is owed to the fact that the controller itself uses part of the total storage space as a so-called spare area.
For instance, the Agility 2 has 28 percent of its total size allocated as such. Reducing that area would, naturally, mean a higher available storage space, but this would also come at the cost of performance. However, AnandTech recently showed that the latest firmware, which reduces that area to 13 percent, doesn't really affect speed that much.
According to Fudzilla, OCZ should soon start selling the Agility 2 Extended SSDs. These drives should be, hardware-wise, almost, if not, completely identical to the Agility 2 Series, but they will have a more recent firmware that will reduce said spare area. As such, they will only be slightly slower than their predecessors, but will store more at the same price.
To be more exact, the storage capacities of the Agility 2 Extended units will be of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, which is 10GB, 20GB and 40GB more than those of existing devices. Of course, OCZ may decide to make some changes to the hardware itself, but this doesn't seem to be the case, at least for now. The units are already listed on Alternate.de.