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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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).