[TSullivan]

OCZ has taken market stratification to its textbook definition with their ever growing SSD family. Within the SATA 6Gb/s space, they offer four drives (in order of performance) including the Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Vertex 3, Agility 3 and our subject today, the Solid 3. Being at the back of the line though isn't always a bad thing; consumers need performance across the scale and the Solid 3 solves one key issue - price. While not blazing fast like it's brothers, the Solid 3 delivers respectable 500MB/s read speeds, 450MB/s writes and 20,000 random write 4K IOPS.

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[Noli]

Firstly, big thanks for reviewing a drive of considerable interest to budget conscious consumers like myself yet not oft reviewed.

One thing - whilst it's definitely great that you've got the whole OCZ sandforce 2 line up in the comparison graphs, it would have been very useful to have at least one first generation sandforce drive (maybe a Vertex 2E?) as a comparison as they are still very much mainstream, popular high volume and competitive drives. After all, I highly doubt anyone considering this drive (budget) is also considering the Max IOPS (super premium) edition! Of course, others such as m3 / m4 may have been interesting too though I appreciate you only tend to have 3 other comparison drives on your graphs.

[Brian]

You make a valid point, for this review we wanted to show the family. We also haven't re-benchmarked the drives you mentioned on the new testbench, so the results would be a tad off. We are working to resolve this problem though with the drive database so you could compare whatever drives you like.

[Gauthier]

Let's hope OCZ ironed the bugs out this time.
I bought a Vertex 3 120GB in may, it was a complete disaster:
First Windows 7 x64 refused to install in AHCI.
After loosing 8 hours desperately trying to install it turns out my drive firmware had some bug.
I had to install in IDE mode then do a drive firmware update to 2.06 before hacking the registry to switch back to AHCI.
After the raving review I had read everywhere, that left me speechless.
How was such a disastrous bug overlooked by the reviewers?

The setup worked for 15 days, then started freezing and doing 0x000000F4 BSOD once or twice a day.
After reboot the drive would have disappeared, a power cycle was needed to get the drive back
One month later they finally released a firmware addressing the issue saying they tweaked the timing...
an euphemism to say back to 3GBS speed.

[Old Dog]

This review couldn't have come at a better time for me. I suspect many people considering this drive may, like me, have laptops with SATA II controllers. It seems to me that in this situation, the differences between this drive and the higher end models might be even smaller, making this the correct choice. It would be very interesting to see a comparison using SATA II as part of the reviews for 'value' drives.

[Kevin OBrien]

Well one interesting part right now is depending on sales, the Agility 3 is only 4-5 bucks more expensive than the Solid 3 before and after rebates. Hopefully the differences widen as the products mature over this year.

[Old Dog]

Old Dog, on 05 July 2011 - 01:48 PM, said:

This review couldn't have come at a better time for me. I suspect many people considering this drive may, like me, have laptops with SATA II controllers. It seems to me that in this situation, the differences between this drive and the higher end models might be even smaller, making this the correct choice. It would be very interesting to see a comparison using SATA II as part of the reviews for 'value' drives.

Heck, right now the Agility is less than the Solid on Google Shopping. I'm hoping the market corrects this and the solid prices get more realistic.

[Brian]

Hey, an Agility 3 for under $100 is market correction if you ask me

Too bad it's a rebate...I've never done a NewEgg rebate, not sure how painful or painless they are.