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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RBFL - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
What do you define as decent priced?xrror - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
The worst part I'm guessing is finding anything decently priced that isn't 1366x768. I hate that resolution so much. My keep looking to replace my old core2 craptop that wheezes along (sadly it uses the most gimped/market segmented version of the Intel 945GM chipset), But it uses an old school 1440x900 screen - and that vertical space I refuse to give up.Sorry folks, when I see 768 - that was only cool back when 1024x768 was an upgrade from VGA's 800x600. F going back.
Samus - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link
Look at HP Elitebooks like the 820 and 840, they come standard with 1600x900 screens (which is a perfect resolution on the 12.5" 820.1920x1080 is fine and all on a 14"+ but really sucks on a 11-13" unless you have display scaling. Windows 7 and Linux it just sucks unless you have eagle vision.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
@Samus: "Look at HP Elitebooks like the 820 and 840, they come standard with 1600x900 screens (which is a perfect resolution on the 12.5" 820."I do rather like that resolution for this size on a notebook. Tablets are generally used at a closer distance, but I digress.
@Samus: "1920x1080 is fine and all on a 14"+ but really sucks on a 11-13" unless you have display scaling. Windows 7 and Linux it just sucks unless you have eagle vision."
Yet I'd still rather see 1920x1080 than 1366x768 as I find it less frustrating to lean a little closer when I need to than to not be able to get the content I want on screen. Until better scaling is commonplace, 1680x1050 or 1600x900 please.
Arbie - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
The link below is a 2011 review on Anandtech, showing Velociraptor scores vs SSDs of the time. You can estimate pretty well from that how things would compare now.FYI, the Mushkin Reactor 1TB MLC SSD (reviewed here recently) is available for $220 on NeweggBusiness.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4337/z68-ssd-caching...
Samus - Sunday, April 3, 2016 - link
Excellent drive (the Mushkin Reactor) I have recommended it at least a dozen times and never heard a complaint. Stark contrast to the one person who didn't take my advice (I have two of them so I know how good they are) and bought the Sandisk Ultra II 960GB instead because it was $20 cheaper. It failed on them after 4 months. Which is alarmingly common if you read the reviews on Newegg.Ryan Smith - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
"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?"It's definitely something we can look into. Keep in mind that we'd only be able to use them for a portion of the tests though; even a 7200 RPM drive would be impossibly slow on tests like the Destroyer that involve a lot of random activity.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
@Ryan Smith: "It's definitely something we can look into. Keep in mind that we'd only be able to use them for a portion of the tests though; even a 7200 RPM drive would be impossibly slow on tests like the Destroyer that involve a lot of random activity."That is fine. The destroyer was made to tease out differences in performance and consistency between SSDs that are so high end that are hidden in lesser tests. One of your other (far less strenuous) tests is good enough as a reference point to show how HDDs stack with respect to random activity.
jsntech - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
From a strictly business point of view, Toshiba should probably re-brand OCZ to some other name. Not a single member of my moderate circle of pro or power user friends will ever touch anything with OCZ in the name again. And they all told their friends, and they all told their friends, etc.Flunk - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
I'd personally be happier with "Toshiba".