OCZ Agility 2 SSD Review

Three months ago, I purchased three OCZ Agility 2 solid-state disk drives. OCZ has, in the past, had a few winners in the price:performance arena, and I thought I'd try these out.

The price was reasonable, and performance was good, including power savings for the laptops. But the quality (or lack there of) astounded me. The first drive worked... but after a couple of days, put itself into a sort of "read-only" mode. You could do anything you wanted to the drive - write to it, delete contents, even format it - and after a power cycle, all of the original contents were back. While that's a nifty party trick, it's not useful in a laptop. So, I tried doing a firmware update. Their updater went about halfway through, gave an error, and the drive was dead.

So, I moved on to the second drive. It worked for twenty minutes, then gave an error, and the drive was also dead.

The third drive hasn't failed... yet. But given what happened with the first two, I'm not using it for anything important. I'm sure that OCZ would replace the dead drives for me if I sent them back, but honestly, if QC is that poor with these drives, I wouldn't want the replacements anyway.

As replacements, I bought Intel 320- and 510-series drives. They're more expensive, but they have an amazing bonus... all of them work.