OCZ TRION 150 - 240 GB SSD review - Introduction

OCZ Trion 150 Series SSD with 15nm NAND
Value for money at 30 cents per GB

OCZ updated their Trion series SSDs towards Trion 150, at launch they will out four models. In a saturated and dense market, budget is trivial. The new Trion 150 series are all about value. It is an SSD series that is 100% Toshiba proprietary, that includes the controller and NAND flash memory. To make the product more cost effective the TRION series comes with the latest iteration of 15nm Toshiba TLC NAND flash memory. Value for money wise you will receive a an SSD series that is fast enough, it won't break your wallet and comes with a great after-sales warranty program.

Yes, in a storage world dominated by the big guns like Micron and Samsung margins are getting smaller and smaller. OCZ needed to address that to get the price per gigabyte down and offer a competitive solution that is fast, will be excellent in any PC and obviously a product that can compete with the Samsung 850 EVO in both price and performance. To do so OCZ is offering the Trion series SSD, an in-house Toshiba controller steers all new A19 15nm TLC based NAND flash memory from Toshiba to drive their SSDs to a bargain level. Now, writes in certain scenarios will will be hurt in performance with TLC, that is a fact... but as long as you do not write gigabytes continously over and over, and thus use Trion in a PC or Laptop for normal usage, then you are looking at an SSD performing in the 550 MB/sec range. Not bad at 30 cents per GB eh?

So the Trion 150 series is obviously SATA 6Gb/s based and comes with read performance of up-to 550MB/s and a peak write performance of 520MB/s with IOPS 4K read/Write: 90k/43k. These SSDs are rated at 60TB TB written during the 3-year warranty period. Peak power we think is a little on the high side at 4.8W (operation) but is good at 0.83W (idle). At  €270 you can now even pick a 960GB model, a volume size that is growing rapidly in popularity. That's next to 120, 240 and 480 GB versions of course. Endurance is another factor alongside reliability. In today's review for example we'll look at the product and see how fast it remains even after thrashing the SSD with over 3TB host writes written. The Trion 150 series isn't shy with writing either, this SSD series is rated at 60TB written for three years for the 240GB model that we test. The Trion series is receiving a ShieldPlus warranty (we'll explain what that entails in the conclusion). The end result is an SSD that is fast and competitive in terms of pricing. The series also offers 4K random access throughput of up to 90,000 IOPS (read) (depending on volume size). But with TLC, writes will be lower in the 25K to 65K IOPS range depending on volume size, that is the trade-off really.

It was only a year and half ago that we wrote that SSD prices settled at just under 1 EURO per GB for the end-user, last year prices have been hovering at 70 cents per GB and currently you can already find SSDs priced as low as at 30~35 Cents (EURO) per Gigabyte of storage volume. The Trion 150 breaks down that price even more at just under 30 cents per GB. 

Trion 150 120GB (TRN150-25SAT3-120G)	€48	550 MB/sec Read - 450 MB/sec Write
Trion 150 240GB (TRN150-25SAT3-240G)	€71	550 MB/sec Read - 520 MB/sec Write
Trion 150 480GB (TRN150-25SAT3-480G)	€142	550 MB/sec Read - 530 MB/sec Write
Trion 150 960GB (TRN150-25SAT3-960G)	€270	550 MB/sec Read - 530 MB/sec Write

The specs are decent enough by any standard. The models have sustained read levels of close to 550 MB/sec and up-to 530 MB/sec respectively. Have a peek first, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.