The OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on April 1, 2016 8:00 AM EST
Last year's OCZ Trion 100 was the first drive released by OCZ as a subsidiary of Toshiba, and was really more of a Toshiba product that was released under the OCZ brand. As a prime opportunity to reestablish the OCZ brand post-bankruptcy, the Trion 100 was initially disappointing for its poor performance. It has since become clear that the Trion 100 was merely an early entrant in a race to the bottom that has seen sub-20nm planar TLC used to drive price down as much as possible even at the cost of performance.
While the price of MLC-based drives has also been declining, the new class of low-end TLC drives has made SSDs far more accessible by trading some performance for capacity. Most manufacturers are very explicit about marketing these SSDs for upgrades from hard drives rather than from earlier and smaller and more expensive SSDs, but it's hard not to make those comparisons. It's important to keep in mind that for the cheapest SSDs on the market, maximizing performance is not the only goal and often isn't even a primary goal.
Today we're taking a look at the successor to the Trion 100, the Trion 150. On paper, the OCZ Trion 150 looks like a fairly uninteresting update. The flash is changed from Toshiba's A19nm TLC to their 15nm TLC, which is cause for concern about how the smaller flash memory cells might hurt performance and endurance. The Trion is still using Toshiba's TC58NC1010 controller, a custom branded variant of Phison's S10. The performance specifications of the Trion 150 are unchanged from the Trion 100, but OCZ has made non-specific claims about performance improving for things like sustained performance. For that to be possible with what would seem to be a disadvantageous die shrink of the flash, the drive's firmware needs to be much better than the Trion 100's.
| OCZ Trion 150 Specifications | ||||||
| Capacity | 120GB | 240GB | 480GB | 960GB | ||
| Controller | Toshiba TC58NC1000 (Phison S10) | |||||
| NAND | Toshiba 15nm TLC | |||||
| Sequential Read | 550MB/s | 550MB/s | 550MB/s | 550MB/s | ||
| Sequential Write | 450MB/s | 520MB/s | 530MB/s | 530MB/s | ||
| 4KB Random Read | 79K IOPS | 90K IOPS | 90K IOPS | 90K IOPS | ||
| 4KB Random Write | 25K IOPS | 43K IOPS | 54K IOPS | 64K IOPS | ||
| Endurance | 30TB | 60TB | 120TB | 240TB | ||
| DevSleep Power | 6mW | |||||
| Idle Power | 830mW | |||||
| Max Power | 4.8W | |||||
| Warranty | Three years | |||||
| Price (Amazon) | $45.99 | $61.99 | $117.49 | $229.99 | ||
Externally the Trion 150 is very similar to the Trion 100: the casing is identical and the labeling is only slightly changed. Opening things up we immediately see that more has changed than just the NAND flash dies. The flash is now in 16 TSOP packages rather than 4 BGA packages, requiring a much larger PCB but allowing for much cheaper packaging. The layout of the PCB around the controller and DRAM is similar to the Trion 100, but there's now a thermal pad between the controller and the case.
As the successor to the Trion 100, the Trion 150 will be OCZ and Toshiba's entry-level SSD and will compete against the drives with the lowest price per gigabyte, now hovering around 20¢/GB. The primary competitors and points of comparison will be other drives with 15/16nm TLC such as ADATA's Premier SP550 and Crucial's BX200 (both using Silicon Motion's SM2256 controller) and drives from many brands using the Phison S10 platform and Toshiba TLC.
| AnandTech 2015 SSD Test System | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-4770K running at 3.5GHz (Turbo & EIST enabled, C-states disabled) |
| Motherboard | ASUS Z97 Deluxe (BIOS 2501) |
| Chipset | Intel Z97 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 2x8GB (9-10-9-27 2T) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 4600 |
| Desktop Resolution | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS | Windows 8.1 x64 |
- Thanks to Intel for the Core i7-4770K CPU
- Thanks to ASUS for the Z97 Deluxe motherboard
- Thanks to Corsair for the Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1866 DRAM kit, RM750 power supply, Carbide 200R case, and Hydro H60 CPU cooler
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nathanddrews - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
https://youtu.be/iAwagCwJj-gI can't speak for DanNeely, but my DVD/Blu-ray server alone is 32TB now (~4TB free after duplication). Other miscellaneous storage: ~10TB. I wouldn't bother converting the video server over to SSDs, but my other devices I certainly will when the price is right. To be honest, my storage needs have slowed a lot in the past year. Once I can start backing up UHD Blu-ray discs, that will change, but not a lot. I'll just replace existing DVD or Blu-ray backups with the UHD versions. There are only a handful of new movies each year that are worth buying anyway IMO.
bji - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Jesus man you buy alot of movies. 32 TB is around 640 Blu-Ray backups if my math is correct. At a minimum of $10 per Blu-Ray (which is almost certainly an under-estimate), you're talking $6,400 just in the media alone. 32 TB of SSD is probably peanuts for someone with your budget :)xrror - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
RedBox and/or Blockbuster Video. Also many public libraries have movies in their collection. Just saying ;)bji - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link
Whatever. Enjoy your hoarding of content you'll likely never watch again just because it feels so good to rip content producers off. Oh and then why don't you come to Anandtech and whine about how expensive the storage is for your ripped off goods. Not you specifically of course, but there are people who do both of these things. Despicable.BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
@bji: " Enjoy your hoarding of content you'll likely never watch again just because it feels so good to rip content producers off. Oh and then why don't you come to Anandtech and whine about how expensive the storage is for your ripped off goods."Sadly, this is too often the case. While I don't support MPAA / RIAA practices of treating everyone like a criminal, people who do this make it hard for them to trust anyone. In the end, it is the honest consumer that suffers as measures taken by studios to prevent these actions generally only make things more inconvenient for those who don't make a practice of bypassing them. Given that I like my entertainment to be entertaining and not frustrating, I've elected to drop movie watching almost completely until such a time as I enjoy it again. However, that gives no justification to rip them off.
bji - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
What? A moral viewpoint on the internet? Didn't April Fools pass already? :)mkaibear - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link
It's not unreasonable.Speaking personally I subscribe to Amazon Prime so I don't buy a lot of TV or movies but I do generally pick up a few each year.
Supernatural, Bones, Castle, The Flash, Arrow, plus a few miscellaneous TV series, plus maybe five movies per year means I'm racking up thirty to forty Blu-rays per year, and I've got a 3.5 year old so don't get anything like enough time to watch telly compared to what I used to. In a different situation I could easily see myself tripling that! 640 brs is only about 5 years' consumption at that point.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
@bji: "32 TB is around 640 Blu-Ray backups if my math is correct. At a minimum of $10 per Blu-Ray (which is almost certainly an under-estimate), you're talking $6,400 just in the media alone."Well he did say:
@nathanddrews: "... my DVD/Blu-ray server alone is 32TB now (~4TB free after duplication)."
So its more like 28TB (used) / 2 (duplication) = 14TB or something like 280 Blu-Ray backups by your math. You're talking $2800 at your specified minimum price of $10. Still quite the budget, but less than half of what you stated.
@bji: "32 TB of SSD is probably peanuts for someone with your budget :)"
He isn't the one (at least up to this point) complaining about the price of SSDs. He is simply stating a personal use case that uses large amounts of storage, presumably in an attempt to show the people in this thread that there are legitimate reasons someone may need more than just the 256GB SSD storage in their Macbook Pro retina. Certainly such a use case is not the common user, though.
Another point of interest is that he never stated over what time period he acquired said collection. $280 a year for 10 years is a lot more palatable than $2800 in a single year. That's still more movies than I'll probably watch in my lifetime, but movies aren't my thing. If they were, I'd have to consider that, regardless of my yearly budget, a $230 1TB (rounded) Trion SSD is worth about 23 movies by your stated minimum pricing. To replace his 32TB array (not sure if he uses raid or another form of duplication) would cost about $7360. That's worth more movies than he could theoretically store without duplication (using your stated minimum pricing).
Lolimaster - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
I got 4x 6TB WD Blacks.Movies (BD rips)
Anime (BD rips)
Manga
adult anime manga and mangazines :P
some popcorn
Lolimaster - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
+Nintendo DS, 3DS, Wii, PSP, roms and PC games (I delete what i complete, easy to get if want to play them again).