HD Tune Pro 4.61:
Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the Agility 3's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.
 OCZ Agility 3 120GB - Read Benchmark |
 Plextor PX-128M2S - Read Benchmark |
 OCZ Agility 3 120GB - Write Benchmark |
 Plextor PX-128M2S - Write Benchmark |
The Agility 3 performed very well when benchmarked with HD Tune. The drive had average read and write speeds of 486.9 MB/s and 381.0 MB/s, respectively, and a burst rate of 330 MB/s when reading.
 OCZ Agility 3 120GB - Random Access Read |
 Plextor PX-128M2S - Random Access Read |
 OCZ Agility 3 120GB - Random Access Write |
 Plextor PX-128M2S - Random Access Write |
The Agility 3 didn't disappoint when doing random reads and writes. When reading 4KB blocks, the drive reached 11339 IOPS and had an average speed of 44.295 MB/s. The Agility 3 was even faster when writing, reaching 17899 IOPS with an average speed of 69.918 MB/s.
Iometer:
Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the Agility 3's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using both repeating and random bytes and a queue depth of 3.
The Agility 3's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. With highly compressible, repeating data, the drive was able to read at 501.82 MB/s and write at 421.63 MB/s. Unfortunately, the Agility 3 did not perform nearly as well with random data. In our tests, the drive's read and write speeds dropped to 278.62 MB/s and 146.34 MB/s, respectively.
The Agility 3 performed very well when doing random reads and writes. With repeating data, the drive was able to read at 51.54 MB/s and write at a blazing 258.59 MB/s. Here too, the Agility 3 took a performance hit when tested with random data. However, it was still able to write at 139.15 MB/s.
According to OCZ, the Agility 3 is capable of 50,000 IOPS when randomly writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 66,201 IOPS with repeating data and 35,623 IOPS with random data.
