The Impact of Spare Area on SandForce, More Capacity At No Performance Loss?

Instead of around 28% of the drive’s NAND set aside as spare area, this version of the Agility 2 has 13%. You get more capacity to store data, at the expense of potentially lower performance. How much lower? That’s exactly what I’ve spent the past several days trying to find out.

The drive looks just like a standard Agility 2. OCZ often makes special runs of drives for testing with no official labels or markings, in fact that's what my first SandForce drive came as late last year. Internally the drive looks identical to the Agility 2 we reviewed not too long ago.