OCZ Trion 100 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Bringing Toshiba to the Retail
by Kristian Vättö on July 9, 2015 12:01 PM ESTFinal Words
The bar for TLC SSDs was set by Samsung in 2012 and frankly that bar was set very high. As a company that develops everything in-house, Samsung has a massive advantage when it comes to new technologies because its controller and NAND teams can collaborate in a way that's not possible for other companies. In the end, TLC is both a NAND and a controller game because you need to do tricks on both sides to design a drive that can provide close to MLC-like performance, while still keeping the cost benefits of TLC.
To date, nobody has been able to cross the bar Samsung set and neither does the Trion 100. In fact, the Trion is the slowest modern TLC drive we've tested and in some cases it is so by a quite hefty margin. Typical to TLC drives, the Trion falls short under anything IO intensive. It does perform okay (although it's still the slowest) in our Light trace, but as soon as the IO workload is increased the Trion begins to hiccup. Since the Trion is an entry-level drive, that's not a matter of life and death because in most cases it will only be subjected to basic client workloads, which are far from being IO intensive, perhaps negating the issue and moving the contest more to price.
The specific areas that need improvement are low queue depth read performance and write performance in general. Random read performance especially at queue depth of 1 is lacking and up to 50% lower compared to competing drives, and for some reason the sequential read performance has queue depth scaling issues at 480GB and 960GB where the drive needs a very high queue depth to reach its maximum throughput. Despite using a pseudo-SLC cache for writes, the write performance in every scenario is underwhelming and one of the key issues is the fact that there is absolutely no performance scaling with queue depth regardless of the capacity.
The poor performance also translates to power inefficiency. Because the drive spends more time processing each IO, it will end up idling less than a faster drive would and as we saw in the trace-based tests that results in higher total power consumed than any other drive we have tested. For desktop users this is hardly an issue, but I would suggest mobile users to look elsewhere, namely BX100 and 850 EVO.
| Amazon Price Comparison (7/9/2015) | ||||
| 120/128GB | 240/250/256GB | 480/500/512GB | 960GB/1TB | |
| OCZ Trion 100 | $60 | $90 | $180 | $360 |
| Crucial BX100 | $65 | $90 | $180 | $380 |
| OCZ ARC 100 | $54 | $89 | $170 | - |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $68 | $98 | $162 | $378 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $63 | $90 | $173 | $330 |
| Transcend SSD370 | $58 | $90 | $176 | $359 |
The downside of being the slowest modern drive we have tested is that OCZ can only compete in price, but unfortunately the pricing isn't aggressive enough for the Trion to be competitive at all. Currently the ARC 100 is even cheaper than the Trion 100, which just doesn't make any sense because even OCZ is positioning the ARC 100 higher on paper and it's undoubtedly a better drive all way around. There is usually some level of decline from the initial street price soon after the launch, but in all honesty OCZ needs to cut the prices by 15-20% for the Trion to have a place on the market. OCZ told us that it will be running promotions with discounts, but it remains to be seen if those can bring the prices down to a level where performance and price meet. It has the lowest performance, thus it needs to be priced lower than the competition to provide the value to the user because right now I wouldn't have to think twice about buying the BX100 or 850 EVO over the Trion 100.
All in all, getting TLC done right is far from an easy job as we have witnessed with here. I believe that with the first big wave of TLC SSDs coming this year we are going to see sub-par performance compared to MLC drives. Fundamentally I have no problem with that because even a "slow" modern TLC SSD is a significant upgrade from a hard drive, but it is time for the manufacturers to realize that the price should reflect performance. It's just silly to take up to 50% hit in performance and only offer a few dollar savings because any educated buyer will gladly pay the extra few dollars for a substantially better drive. Once other NAND vendors start to ship 3D NAND in volume next year, we will likely see the majority of client SSDs move to TLC because as Samsung showed with the 850 EVO, 3D TLC NAND can enable planar MLC-like performance, but in the meantime it seems like MLC SSDs will still provide better overall value.
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valnar - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
19nm process *and* TLC *and* a brand new ECC method? No thanks. Sounds too risky.NvidiaWins - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
There's a reason OCZ went bankrupt....their SSD's are HORRIBLE!hojnikb - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Good thing this is OCZ only by name.Read the d*** article.
ES_Revenge - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
Certainly a fail for OCZ/Toshiba. You'd think they would have "went back to the drawing board" with this instead of "releasing to the market". Ugh.But, OCZ does have some very good drives out there. Vector 150/180, Vertex 460/A, Radeon R7 drives are all very good (Vector with some impeccable services times and very fast at regular-people workloads), but in the SSD market competition is pretty stiff. If you can get one of the above OCZ drives at a good/sale price they can be excellent drives for the money. The ARC 100 was somewhat disappointing but not terrible so I don't see them as worth buying unless you're getting them at a really good price. The Trion though, not much else to say but fail.
Looks very much like this is a Phison-controlled drive and though Phison isn't bad it seems to require very specific NAND/configuration to actually shine. Either the TLC handling of the S10 is just poor or Toshiba's TLC isn't that great, or both/combination.
doggface - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
The first manufacturer who can get a 128/256 GB ssd to be (within a few dollars of) the same price as a 5400rpm 500GB HDD -- Will win at life. Full stop. End of argument. All those rubbish midrange laptops that have everything a person needs except fast storage.... All they need is fast storage and they would be very capable and would catapult any OEM into a leading position in that demographic. If they can get this ssd down to those prices for OEM (I realise this is retail) then they have a winner. As an enthusiast drive... Massive fail.doggface - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Seriously, This is the perfect midrange laptop.13.3" display IPS
i5 or i3 (AMD equiv) or top cherrytrail.
4gb ram expandable.
128GB ssd
WiFi-n 5ghz.
Usb3/HDMI, camera etc
A decent keyboard
Clean looks.
If you can do that for $5-600 USD.
Millions of sales.
(U can do a better version with a FHD screen, faster WiFi/cpu/dGPU, bigger capacity SSD.)
Pessimism - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
-Marketing from a dead brand with a bad reputation for reliability... Check!-Design from a stubborn, tight lipped old school Japanese megacorp who refuses to disclose technical details... Check!
-Controller sourced from a bottom-feeding Taiwanese manufacturer accustomed to designing barely functional solutions at minimal cost for OEMs... Check!
Recipe for a winner here!
LazloPanaflex - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
LOL, well said!abufrejoval - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Clearly this drive wasn't designed for ultimate performance, but as I replace more and more of my HDDs with SSDs I begin to worry more about the reliability and endurance of the storage, than the performance:How sure can I be, that after five years of mixed usage, some intensive I/O, some stuff (e.g. baby pictures) only ever written once, the SSD perhaps lying around for two years in a safe or another having suffered through years in a quiet but rather warm passive PC every bit of data will come off exactly as it was written? Add automobile scenarios or others with lots of electronic noise to make things harder.
After all storage isn't just about pounding these things with random bits and see how long they last, it's about delivering on a promise to return everything as it was written a millisecond or years ago.
Anandtech can't really test that, even if they do an incredible job at testing what can be tested within such a short time and a limited budget.
But perhaps it's exactly in that area, the reliability under almost all circumstances, where Toshiba shines and others less so?
So far I never really worried, because my SSDs mostly contained cache data which was quickly forwarded to a RAID of trusted rotating rusties or had a backup copy on them: The overall risks and exposure times were low and seemed well managed with the tests done.
But as the rusties finally spin down and SSDs become the prime medium for all my data, perspective and requirements change.
For example the data decay discussion, where retention time depends and varies widely with write temperature and storage temperature.
If you retire an older SSD (as you might with HDDs) at 80% overwrite capacity used to become a backup device, write data with the drive barely warming beyond room temperature and then put it away in the cellar, dry and above freezing, and then plug it in a year or two later: Will you still get your data back?
Since the drive doesn't have a clock: How does it even know that it should start checking for and compensating bit rot?
What does that mean for your backup strategy: Should you fully rewrite the data every couple of months? Should pre-warm the drive before rewriting to ensure optimal retention?
I can't believe Toshiba was simply unable to design a product which was fast and economic. I'd like to believe that perhaps we are missing their design goal.
Easy to do, when they are keeping so quiet :-)
rocketman122 - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
I wouldnt touch ocz if they gave it to me for free. such garbage and bad ethics as a company. didnt they file for bankruptcy? we dont need crap companies that make drives where people store important data on them. after selling the core series years back with the jmicron chips and knowing they were defective I have no respect for them. I tell anyone that asks about components NEVER to buy OCZ.