OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review

[Guest]

OCZ is on its second-generation TLC-based effort. The new Trion 150 updates the flash to Toshiba's 15nm TLC, but the largest improvement comes from firmware that increases sustained write performance.

OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review : Read more

 

[hdmark]

is anyone else still kind of blown away that SSD's are getting this cheap? maybe im just in a nostalgic mood but I remember when SSD's cost a TON more than this and now were seeing 960gb for almost a quarter a gb

 

[zhunt99]

is anyone else still kind of blown away that SSD's are getting this cheap? maybe im just in a nostalgic mood but I remember when SSD's cost a TON more than this and now were seeing 960gb for almost a quarter a gb

I'm right there with you. I picked up a 480 gb Sandisk Ultra II over black friday for $110. I was pretty happy with that.

 

[ssdpro]

The value has gotten quite good. I also beliew SSDs are at a good value point right now. Sure, they can go lower and closer to HDDs in cost/GB, but you also don't want HDD performance, power consumption, or weight.

OCZ products on the other hand are complicated. Seeing early review returns from actual customers isn't going so well. Some SKUs are showing early failures just like the Trion 100. OCZ needs to make a few drives that are so reliable none fail. Supercaps, full pfail circuitry, two controllers, whatever even at a loss if necessary. OCZ's enemy is reputation and reality.

 

[stevenrix]

When your OCZ ssd runs out of IOPs or fails, try to reflash it, sometimes it will reset the # of IOPS and put it back to 0 and it will work again....

 

[alidan]

is anyone else still kind of blown away that SSD's are getting this cheap? maybe im just in a nostalgic mood but I remember when SSD's cost a TON more than this and now were seeing 960gb for almost a quarter a gb

cheap to the point that in my next computer i was considering a 512gb drive, but now im looking at 900+gb drives... not so much for their boot as i could get by with a 256 drive for just that, but as a loading heavy game drive too.
granted the next pc i build will get partitioned to hell and back due to the boot options i want, possibly a win 7 partition, a second one that is just os for emergency my main os crapped up, win 10 and the same, then some linux distros for playing around with. should be able to get all that and my required programs to run on less then 300gb, so the rest could be for load heavy games.

 

[Sakkura]

Terabyte SSDs are flirting with the $200 barrier. Quite nice, but I'm going to hang onto HDDs for secondary storage for a while longer.

 

[jrharbort]

is anyone else still kind of blown away that SSD's are getting this cheap? maybe im just in a nostalgic mood but I remember when SSD's cost a TON more than this and now were seeing 960gb for almost a quarter a gb

At the sacrifice of overall speed and endurance.

 

[cryoburner]

At the sacrifice of overall speed and endurance.

That implies you actually need that additional speed and endurance though. How many users need a drive that can handle a petabyte of writes? It's unlikely that you'll write much more than a terabyte of data to your system drive each year, so write endurance shouldn't matter much outside of specialized usage scenarios like database servers. I'm not sure if you ever saw that endurance test that Tech Report ran, but they performed continuous writes on various SSDs until failure...

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

Their 250GB Samsung 840 Evo with TLC flash survived over 900TB of writes in that test, and they didn't detect any uncorrectable errors until after 200TB. That would be over 100 years of typical desktop usage, making the endurance of the TLC a non-issue.

And as for performance, just look at the "Real-World Software Performance" benchmarks here. All these drives perform very similarly under most usage scenarios to the point where it's unlikely you would notice any notable difference between them in day to day use. Software is still designed with the performance limitations of hard drives in mind, so aside from perhaps large file transfers and some other fringe scenarios, you're not likely to see a huge difference in performance between lower and higher end SSDs.

And ultimately, if the endurance is far higher than what people using the drive will actually need, it makes sense to trade some of that headroom for additional capacity. Cost per gigabyte is the main thing holding SSDs back from universal adoption over hard drives, and multi-level cell flash is helping to bring those prices down to be competitive.

 

[samopa]

The elephant on the room is reliability. People tend to buy large storage to hold their valuable data. If performance is what they need, RAID 0 of small disks usually is enough.

OCZ is not well-known for their reliability, and most people do not want to store their valuable data on unreliable media. In past few years, I only used Samsung and Intel brands for SSD, yes they cost higher than competing brand like OCZ, but (at least) to me, the value of my data are even higher than that.

So, are they improved their reliability ? I do not want to to loose my dear data overnight because like some people here, I only backup my personal data once a week.

 

[Sakkura]

The elephant on the room is reliability. People tend to buy large storage to hold their valuable data. If performance is what they need, RAID 0 of small disks usually is enough.

OCZ is not well-known for their reliability, and most people do not want to store their valuable data on unreliable media. In past few years, I only used Samsung and Intel brands for SSD, yes they cost higher than competing brand like OCZ, but (at least) to me, the value of my data are even higher than that.

So, are they improved their reliability ? I do not want to to loose my dear data overnight because like some people here, I only backup my personal data once a week.

OCZ had major reliability problems in the early Sandforce days, that's for sure. They were actually improving later on as firmware problems were ironed out and so on. They probably just jumped on the Sandforce bandwagon a bit too quickly. Anyway, improvements or not they went bankrupt. Toshiba bought them up, and if they weren't high quality before, they are now.

Meanwhile, Samsung has had its misstep with the 840 and 840 Evo. But their 850 Evo is great. Again it seems like being an early adopter, this time of TLC NAND, caused issues.

Personally I have an OCZ Agility 3 from 2012 (before the bankruptcy), and it's running just fine. Not that it proves much.

 

[Archaic59]

Samsung and Crucial are still better options with Sandisk coming in third due to high price on their great performing pro model.

 

[Sakkura]

Samsung and Crucial are still better options with Sandisk coming in third due to high price on their great performing pro model.

Crucial is not a good option like it was just a few months ago, since their BX200 is too slow and their faster, older drives like the BX100 are going up in price.

Sandisk is a very solid option, since their Ultra II is reasonably fast and cheaper than anything Samsung offers. At the ½TB point right now, the Ultra II and OCZ's Arc 100 seem like the prime contenders at $130, the Samsung 850 Evo pricing itself out of the picture a little bit. The Trion 150 does go cheaper than the Arc 100 today (price fluctuations since the review), but the Adata SP550 is cheaper still and probably the best option for anyone on a tight budget.

 

[Archaic59]

Samsung and Crucial are still better options with Sandisk coming in third due to high price on their great performing pro model.

Crucial is not a good option like it was just a few months ago, since their BX200 is too slow and their faster, older drives like the BX100 are going up in price.

Sandisk is a very solid option, since their Ultra II is reasonably fast and cheaper than anything Samsung offers. At the ½TB point right now, the Ultra II and OCZ's Arc 100 seem like the prime contenders at $130, the Samsung 850 Evo pricing itself out of the picture a little bit. The Trion 150 does go cheaper than the Arc 100 today (price fluctuations since the review), but the Adata SP550 is cheaper still and probably the best option for anyone on a tight budget.

Thanks for the info. I know about the BX200 performance issue but I didn't realize the 100 was moving up in price. I replaced the stock HD in my laptop with an MX100 last year and it's been great. MX200 competes with the 850 EVO, may as well get the 850. I recently replaced my Sandisk Extreme with a 250GB 850 EVO and it's very solid so far as boot drive. I'm kinda put off by TLC so far and try to recommend MLC whenever possible. You?

 

[Sakkura]

Thanks for the info. I know about the BX200 performance issue but I didn't realize the 100 was moving up in price. I replaced the stock HD in my laptop with an MX100 last year and it's been great. MX200 competes with the 850 EVO, may as well get the 850. I recently replaced my Sandisk Extreme with a 250GB 850 EVO and it's very solid so far as boot drive. I'm kinda put off by TLC so far and try to recommend MLC whenever possible. You?

Mwell, Samsung seems to have figured out TLC with their 850 Evo, and Sandisk with the Ultra II. But other than that, I'm waiting for 3D TLC to proliferate. In general it's an awkward time for SSD upgrades, since we are waiting for both 3D TLC and NVMe to spread through the product stack and become affordable. For now, it's mostly SATA SSDs with performance stuck in 2014.