The OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on April 1, 2016 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Unlike for processors, we've come to expect bad things from a process shrink for flash. It helps lower costs but often hurts endurance and performance. Until recently the performance penalty was mostly a matter of reduced parallelism from higher-capacity NAND flash dies, and as such the penalty could be offset by simply getting a bigger drive. With the value SSD market now dominated by TLC, die shrinks also bring an increased reliance on error correction–and more advanced error correcting schemes like LDPC are much slower.
Given the above, we're very glad to see that the Trion 150 only performs below the Trion 100 on a few tests (most notably, random read speed). I suspect that Toshiba's 15nm flash process was designed with very careful attention to mitigating the disadvantages of TLC flash where possible, but the drive's firmware also deserves a lot of credit. The steady-state performance consistency behavior of the Trion 150 is completely different, vastly better than the Trion 100 and better than a lot of mid-range SATA drives. Most other tests show at least moderate performance improvement relative to the Trion 100. Power efficiency has also improved, though not enough to prevent the improved performance from pushing overall power consumption over 5W at times. Overall the Trion 150 has no trouble proving its worth as an upgrade from a hard drive, and it's better-suited to that purpose than its predecessor.
Several tests showed a marked difference in behavior between the 240GB Trion 150 and the larger capacities, with the 240GB drive sometimes dramatically outperforming or underperforming the othe two sizes. These differences mostly washed out and the results on our AnandTech Storage Bench tests of real-world access patterns showed no such surprises. It would be interesting to know what causes the different behaviors, but none of those results are cause for concern.
When it was first announced, we expected the Trion 150 to be the end of the road for Toshiba's planar TLC SSDs. The race to the bottom has fortunately not kept up quite the same pace with this latest product cycle. While Toshiba is still certainly trying to get their 3D NAND out the door as soon as possible, the Trion 150 shows that their 15nm TLC is not as unsatisfying as we expected. We've also seen Samsung introduce a low-end planar TLC SSD as a cheaper alternative to their 3D NAND options, and companies are continuing their planar NAND R&D efforts alongside 3D NAND development. If another die shrink can be pulled off like the 15nm transition, we might see one more generation of mainstream SSDs using planar flash, though only in certain market segments.
However, for all that the Trion 150 didn't live up to our fears and turned out to be pretty good for a sub-20nm planar TLC drive, it also did nothing to significantly close the performance gap with MLC drives. This means the price still needs to be going down to create a meaningful separation in price tiers between TLC and cheap MLC drives. Aside from a $20 rebate for the 480GB Trion 150 on Newegg, it's not currently priced aggressively, but it's definitely a drive to watch. Any time a sale makes it the cheapest option, it would be the best buy among low-end TLC drives. Against competitors like the ADATA SP550 or PNY CS1311, it can only command a few dollars premium.
| Value SSD Price Comparison | ||||
| Drive | 960GB | 480GB | 240GB | 120GB |
| ADATA SP550 | $217.99 | $109.99 | $58.99 | $38.49 |
| PNY CS1311 | $219.99 | $114.99 | $59.99 | $39.99 |
| OCZ Trion 100 | $199.99 | $139.99 | $59.99 | $39.99 |
| OCZ Trion 150 | $229.99 | $117.49 | $61.99 | $45.99 |
| Crucial BX200 | $239.99 | $119.99 | $63.88 | |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $199.99 | $124.25 | $74.99 | $52.90 |
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ocztaec - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
Hi Arnulf,As this is my first post on this article please allow me to identify myself as a Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) representative. We completely understand the quality concerns and appreciate your comments. Since the Toshiba acquisition of OCZ in 2014 improving product reliability is a key priority for us. We made significant changes to everything from processes to production. OCZ SSDs are made with premium Toshiba NAND and is back by the Advanced Warranty Program.
We understand how you feel and hope that one day we will have the opportunity to demonstrate the reliability of current OCZ products. Thank you again for your feedback.
nathanddrews - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Not a great showing, that's for sure. I'd like to point out two things - one is that we're looking at a range of drives that could be offering 2TB SSDs for under $400. WhereTF are they? I feel like we've been pretty patient, but at these prices, I can actually afford to replace all disks on my PCs and getting really close to replacing disks on my servers and NAS units.Second, would it be at all reasonable to add a WD VelociRaptor, Hybrid SSHD, and/or common 5400RPM hard drive to the 2015 SSD Bench like the old days? I think most of the readership knows how much better ANY SSD is over a mechanical HDD, but I think we also get a bit too cynical with drives like this that are "slow" compared to other SSDs and won't even consider buying them. We shouldn't forget where we came from. XD
tarqsharq - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
I second this, really want to keep perspective on speeds, especially when we're dealing with the low cost SSDs where you can get high storage space for low $$ImSpartacus - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
Yeah, it would a fantastic way to gain context. Just don't worry about scaling the graphs for the hard drives if that ever becomes an issue.bug77 - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Have you seen the size increase of the PCB? There's no space for 2TB worth of chips.DanNeely - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Agreed, as stated in the 2nd paragraph of the article: "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." Yes, the performance sucks compared to anything the average Anandtech reader would put in his computer, but these drives are intended to get people who buy cheap crappy computers at the boxmark off of spinning rust. It might help if the performance charts were split between performance and budget SSDs, otherwise is as unfair as comparing a standard HDD to a 15k SAS drive would've been a dozen years ago.It's still probably 2 or 3 generations before I'd consider SSDing my NAS. Pricing even on cheap SSDs is still ~6x that of NAS HDDs; it'd need to drop to at most 2x before I'd consider it; at that point reduced power consumption over a half dozen years might be able to close enough of the gap that quieter operation and smaller size might be worth the larger up front cost. Also, I'd want at least 6gb of post RAID storage capacity if standing up a new NAS today; probably 10 or 12 if I'd be filling all the bays and unable to add more storage to it later; with my needs growing by about 2x every 3-4 years. The smaller criteria could be met by 4x2gb drives in raid 5; the latter would either need 4gb drives or an 8 bay enclosure. Pre-built 8-bay NASes suffer from an additional enterprise price premium; while on the DIY front that many sata ports is stretching what can be done with cheap hardware and I'm not aware of any mITX sized cases with that many drive bays.
bji - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Just curious, what do you do with all that storage? 10 to 12 TB (I assume your 6gb was a typo and you meant 6tb) is a hell of alot of storage. What do you need so much storage for?I am still using a first gen Macbook pro retina with 256 GB of SSD storage and I have 90 GB free. Even my server that does backups and stuff uses only about 350 GB.
DanNeely - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Media and system backups. About half of the latter is images of old systems that I got rid of at some point. Feeding bigger drives into the nas is a lot easier than trying to scour a system to make sure everything of value's been removed separately. Most recently some scanned documents a family member left in the scanner apps temp folder (that I didn't even know existed).bji - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
What kind of media needs that much storage? Are you a professional videographer?Arnulf - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
P0rn :)