Corsair Force 3 VS OCZ Agility 3

[tranceaddict84]

Hey, I'll just hijack this thread if I may!

I'm currently debating over a 120GB SSD and until I searched around and found this thread, I had narrowed it down to either the Agility 3 or the Force 3, both at £130 and it really was coming down to a coin-flip between them.

Now this thread has thrown the Crucial M4 into the mix, a drive that due to low IOPS and disparate read/write speeds I'd previously overlooked as a bit of an odd-duck. Doing a bit more reading (really in-depth review of Sandforce 2 drives, also comparing with the Crucials here: tomshardware.com/reviews/sf-2200-sandforce-ssd,2987.html) it looks like real-world performance from the Crucial M4 should be significantly better.

A couple of caveats however: my motherboard (ASUS P5Q - P45/ICH10R) is only SATA II and I feel my CPU/memory/mobo is still more than adequately fast so I won't be upgrading to a SATA III board any time soon. I take it the raw straight-line speed of a Sandforce drive will actually take more of a hit from this than the more balanced overall performance of the M4?

Also, with the M4's usable capacity being a full 128GB, I take it you don't get the protection of an additional 8GB chip used for RAISE? This is not a huge issue for me however, as I'll be adding the SSD alongside a few mechanical drives so backing up important stuff won't be a problem.

The dubious reliability and firmware issues of the Sandforce drives is another cause for concern.

I'm leaning towards ordering the M4, unless anyone can think of anything else I haven't considered?

Cheers!

[shaithis]

With SATA-II you can still achieve real-world speeds of 300MB/s

Even if the SSD you purchase can go above that, it is still a phenominal transfer rate compared to HDDs!