Introduction

For as long as I've been writing about SSDs, two issues are played back about the technology. It costs too much and the capacity is not enough. Your record is broken, throw it out. It's time to put your money where your mouth is. For the last few months high quality SSDs have reached the $1 per GB mark. You really can't ask for more than that. For those of you still holding out, let me tell you about the OCZ Agility 4.

OCZ Technology's Agility 4 hit the market at less than $1 per GB. Based on the Indilinx Infused, next generation Marvell SATA III controller and unknown 25nm flash, this SSD is one of the best value drives on the market today for mainstream users. While writing this article Newegg had the 256GB model that we're looking at today for $189.99. That is a very attractive price for a 256GB, SATA III SSD that is capable of over 400MB/s in some benchmarks. Then there are all of the people saying that price just isn't good enough. Well, with coupon code HARDOCPX8X1A you save another 15% which takes off another $28.50 so the price goes down to roughly $161. Did I mention we are talking about a 256GB SSD?

I think that takes care of the price issue. Now we have capacity. To take care of your capacity concerns open My Computer, then look at how much data you actually have on your spinner right now. If you are not using 200GB then you can pull that drive and tuck it away for another day. If you are using more than 200GB then that is fine too. On a desktop you can install several drives and give them drive letters. Your current C drive becomes your new D drive when you reinstall Windows on a new SSD. At that point just save your movies, music and photos on the D drive and it will actually keep your new SSD C drive running faster.

All is not roses and rainbows with the OCZ Technology Agility 4, though. Even though we would love to tell you to run out and get a really low-cost SSD, we can't. In our testing, the first drive died in testing, around 15 minutes into testing. We see a lot of SSDs and this is not the first SSD we've killed. I don't take offence when I kill a drive because I'm abusing them as soon as the system boots up.

What I don't like seeing is when regular users start blowing up drives. At the time of writing, Newegg had 29 user reviews of the OCZ Agility 4 256GB, the same model we have in for testing today. Of those 29 reviews, 11 scored the Agility 4 with a single egg. In the text portion of the user reviews most of the 11 complained of corrupt files, failed Windows installs and BSODs. We love reviewing SSDs, but wish every product could be tested for a year before we give it our blessing. That isn't going to happen. Our benchmark testing is more of a snapshot than it is a portrait when it comes to reliability, something that should always be considered when reading SSD reviews.

Even though we give the disclaimer, we have to hold onto the facts. Fact number one is the OCZ Agility 4 appears to have a very high failure rate, at least when it comes to Newegg users. Fact number two, this isn't OCZ's first troubled product that falls into the low price category.

The Petrol, another low cost SSD coming from the OCZ stable has a very poor user rating at Newegg as well. I'm not prepared to speculate what the problem is with these low cost offerings from OCZ, but I'm going to give it a shot anyhow.