The OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review

Final 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.