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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Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
That isn't neccessarily true. Barefoot 3 firmware has been excellent from the beginning. Performance is good and reliability in my experience has been excellent.As far as OCZ drives go (this Toshiba drive included) Barefoot 3 drives are the only models to consider. We all know about OCZ's Sandforce firmware reliability and the Indilinx Everest has worse performance than the Marvell-based equivalent.
I still find it hard to consider drives other than Crucial MX100's and even older M500's because they are so reliable and inexpensive.
I just don't trust Samsung TLC drives, though, although quite hypocritically I am running the 850 EVO M.2 (500GB) in my laptop right now, which replaced a Crucial M550 (256GB) because Crucial's only M.2 single-sided drives in 512GB capacity are the MX200 which leaves a lot to be desired performance and power-wise, compared to the 850 EVO.
I just hope performance doesn't fall like a rock like the 840 EVO's did.
theuglyman0war - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
hasn't it been long enough now to discern whether or not the 850 TLC suffers the same problems as the 840's? Was really hoping for a definitive follow up article by now. Or at least a community consensus. ( though I suppose it is rather cowardly to ask " did u guys blow yer money" as a research strategy :) )IlllI - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
I wonder when toshiba bought them out, if they were aware of the stigma of how awful the ocz line/brand of ssds were, and most people 'in the know' avoided them.Gigaplex - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
The stigma of OCZ isn't the only confusing part. Toshiba built their own in house SSD, why did they need OCZ in the first place?Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Because toshiba drives are dog slow. They have lost a lot of OEMs because of their performance. Look at the original macbook's that randomly gave customers toshiba or Samsung drives...take a guess which ones were substantially better? OCZ has indilinx which was easily worth what toshiba paid.Gigaplex - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
And yet Toshiba opted to rebrand a Toshiba drive as OCZ, rather than the other way around.JellyRoll - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
You know what is REALLY amazing? This has better endurance than the 2TB 850 Pro, which is only .04 DWPD. Part of that is due to its ten-year warranty, BUT if you normalize the warranty periods the 850 PRO (and its 2bit MLC 3D V-NAND) is still not competitive with the 2D planar TLC on the OCZ. Shocking indeed.melgross - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Don't make the error of confabulating "endurance", which is really no more than a theoretical number, with reliability. Samsung g's drives have, for the most part, proved to be reliable whereas OCz's have not.In fact, a problem here is that Toshiba has had their own reliability problems.
These tests don't tell us anything about that, as Anandtech has been enamoured with OCZ going way back, despite all of their problems. I'm disappointed they're even bothering to talk about OCZ until their reliability in the field is proven after the purchase. Otherwise, it's just more wasted time and energy.
Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Samsung drives have proven to be reliable, in that they don't fail, but they have also proven to have what is being covered up as a technological manufacturing defect dating back to the TLC-based 840 EVO that literally destroys the performance of the drive. The chill factor is Samsung A) initially ignored the issue, GM-style B) failed to fix the issue twice over 9 months of firmware updates and C) is now back to ignoring the issue, GM-style.At least OCZ published routine firmware updates, honored their warranties, and provided competitive prices.
kpb321 - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
I think the big issue with the 850Pro is that the warranty and rating on the drive is more about targeting a specific market rather than the actual performance of the V-NAND. The drive should be capable of much higher endurance. MLC V-NAND should have a much much higher endurance than TLC as it is trying to store fewer bits per cell and is a step back in lithography size making the cells bigger. Maybe Samsung is using some really low quality V-NAND in the 850 pro but I think it is really about "targeting" the drive at the consumer market rather than the data center.