14 DAY TRIAL // We wrote about the new, high-end power supply that OCZ developed, and now we are looking at some storage products that, like the Fatal1ty 1000W, are only going to be accessible to a limited number of customers, at least at first.
Then again, unlike with the enthusiast PSU, the reason why not many people will be able to buy the new solid state drives is not that they are too expensive (though some may disagree) but that they haven't been launched worldwide.
So far, the units have shown up only in Japan, which makes their consumer base small at best.
Of course, OCZ will probably unleash them in the US and Europe as well eventually, not to mention the rest of ASIA.
That said, the SSDs are part of the Agility 3 series and rely on the SandForce SF-2281 controller chip.
With that chip managing the data transfers, their cheap, asynchronous NAND Flash memory is able to read data at up to 525 MB/s and write it at a maximum of 500 MB/s.
Furthermore, the 4K random write performance is of 35,000 IOPS.
Strangely enough, we have an inversion in performance specs. We are used to seeing NAND storage units where speed goes up along with capacity, but the opposite holds true in this case.
While the 180 GB SSD can attain the aforementioned limits, the 360 GB drive is limited to 495 MB/s when writing.
OCZ's Agility 3 line already included members with 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB capacities.
That means that the AGT3-25SAT3-180G fills the fairly big gap between the first two, while the 360 GB newcomer (AGT3-25SAT3-360G) sits comfortably between the 240GB and 480GB products.
The price for the 180 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD is 19,000 JPY, the equivalent of $256 / 175 Euro, while the 360GB model sells for 36,000 JPY ($447 / 331.83 Euro).