By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: OCZ Storage Solutions
Product Name: Trion 150 480GB SSD
Part Number: TRN150-25SAT3-480G
UPC: 842024037705
Prices: 120GB $45.99 (Amazon) 240GB $69.99 (Amazon), 480GB $139.99 (Amazon), 960GB: $269.99 (Amazon)

Full Disclosure: OCZ provided the product sample used in this article.

OCZ Storage Solutions, a subsidiary of Toshiba, has a new entry into the burgeoning field of low-cost consumer TLC (triple-level cell) NAND SSDs: the Trion 150. Featuring a new (and somewhat mysterious) Toshiba controller backing up also new Toshiba 15nm TLC NAND, the Trion 150 is aimed squarely at the consumer who’s been waiting for prices on larger SSDs to drop to this level. Historically, drives based on TLC NAND have suffered from significant performance and durability compromises. Benchmark Reviews will run this drive through our gamut of tests to see if these issues are still a factor you should be aware of.

We’ve tested one other TLC NAND drive recently, the MyDigitalSSD BP5e. We found that while this drive has made some progress on the performance front relative to other TLC drives, there were still significant limitations in sustained write speeds and random I/O speeds. Offsetting these performance issues– which, to be honest, had little relevance to real-world performance in a typical consumer system– was the very low retail price, especially for the 960GB version. It will be interesting to see how OCZ’s entry, boasting both a new controller and new NAND, compares.

Capacity	480GB
Interface	SATA
Form Factor	2.5″
Controller	Toshiba
NAND	Toshiba 15nm Flash
RAID?	Yes
TRIM	Yes
NCQ?	Yes
Max. Read	Up to 550MB/sec
Max. Write	Up to 530MB/sec
Durability	120TB
Warranty	3 years

No matter how fast your processor, memory, or video card is, your computer will still be limited by its slowest component: the hard disk. While hard disk speed has improved tremendously since the “early days”, with large caches and 10,000RPM spindle speeds, even the fastest hard disk’s performance is glacial compared to the rest of the computer. The situation only gets worse with modern pre-emptive multitasking operating systems, where dozens of threads are running simultaneously and competing for your disk’s limited response time and bandwith.

Consider: the average time to move a high-performance hard disk’s read/write head to a new track will be less than 10ms, which seems pretty fast. But your CPU is galloping along at billions of cycles per second, and will spend a significant amount of its time just waiting for the hard disk to fulfill its last request. Hard disk performance has plateued in the last few years, running up against the physical limitations of spindle speeds, magnetic media density, and head servomotor performance. At the end of the day, disks are limited by the fact that they’re comprised of physical, moving parts.

With no moving parts, Solid State Drive technology removes this bottleneck. The difference an SSD makes to operational response times and program speeds is dramatic: while a faster video card makes your games faster, and a faster processor makes compute-bound tasks faster, Solid State Drive technology makes your entire system faster, improving initial response times by more than 450x (45,000%) for applications and Operating System software, when compared to their mechanical HDD counterparts. The biggest mistake PC hardware enthusiasts make with regard to SSD technology is grading them based on bandwidth speed alone. File transfer speeds are important, but only so long as the operational I/O performance can sustain that bandwidth under load.

As we’ve explained in our SSD Benchmark Tests: SATA IDE vs AHCI Mode guide, Solid State Drive performance revolves around two dynamics: bandwidth speed (MB/s) and operational performance I/O per second (IOPS). These two metrics work together, but one may bemore important than the other. Consider this analogy: bandwidth determines how much cargo a ship can transport in one voyage, and operational IOPS performance is how fast that ship moves. By understanding this and applying it to SSD storage, there is a clear importance set on each variable depending on the task at hand.

For casual users, especially those with laptop or desktop computers that have been upgraded to use an SSD, the naturally quick response time is enough to automatically improve the user experience. Bandwidth speed is important, but only to the extent that operational performance meets the minimum needs of the system. If an SSD has a very high bandwidth speed but a low operational performance, it will take longer to load applications and boot the computer into Windows than if the SSD offered a higher IOPS performance. That said, high iOPS performance is more of a concern for server and business use than most consumer systems.

OCZ Storage Solutions was acquired by Toshiba a few years ago, and uses Toshiba controllers and NAND in their solid state storage products. While we’re starting to see a transition from the SATA interface to the much faster PCI-E based m.2 interface, the vast majority of consumer systems still don’t have m.2 slots. While PCI-E to m.2 adapter cards are available, the limited number of PCI-E lanes in many consumer systems– especially enthusiast systems with multiple GPUs– mean that even this solution isn’t always workable.

So there’s still a market for SATA 6G SSDs, which can be connected to virtually any computer, and still offer excellent performance compared to a hard disk. Even if your motherboard supports m.2, you may choose a SATA SSD for price or storage capacity reasons.

The OCZ Trion 150 SSD is housed in a matte-finished aluminum enclosure with this branding sticker on the front. The sticker isn’t quite straight.

The rear of the SSD has another crooked sticker showing the model number, serial number, and other information. From this view it’s evident that the aluminum enclosure is of the snap-together type.

The drive has 16 Toshiba NAND memory chips, 8 on each side. The number of chips is unusual in a 512GB and smaller drive these days; normally, I’d expect only 8.

The other side of the PCB contains the Mystery Controller, hidden here under a pad of thermal foam. Above the controller is a Micro D9PXV DDR3 RAM chip, which provides 4Gb (256MB) of cache storage.

Like the MyDigitalSSD BP5e, the OCZ Trion 150 comes unformatted, and includes no backup or other utility software, nor any adapter brackets or mounting screws: it’s just a bare drive in a box with a warranty and quick installation leaflet for documentation. Let’s start running this drive through our benchmark suite in the next section.

When we test storage devices, the two main metrics to consider are access time and transfer rate. Simply put, access time is the time is takes the storage device to start delivering data once the request has been received, while transfer rate is how fast (megabytes per second) the data comes once the transfer operation begins. With a hard disk, data transfer cannot begin until the disk’s head servo physically moves the read/write head to the correct track, and the rotation of the disk brings the designated sector under the head. Although modern servos are very fast, in the best case you’re still looking at several milliseconds to do this, while an SSD’s access time is always under a millisecond. The disadvantage is even worse if the data isn’t all in a contiguous space on the disk, since the head will have to be repositioned on the fly, leading to more delays.

Early consumer SSDs actually had slower transfer rates than the best hard disks, although their instantaneous access times more than made up for it. The zenith of consumer hard disk performance was probably reached in 2012 with the release of the Western Digital Velociraptor 1 terabyte disk. Spinning at 10,000RPM, this disk could under ideal circumstances (i.e. a synthetic bandwidth test) reach a sequential transfer rate of over 230MB/s. Keep this figure in mind as you read this review.

Early on in our SSD coverage, Benchmark Reviews published an article which detailed Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing. The research and discussion that went into producing that article changed the way we now test SSD products. Our previous perceptions of this technology were lost on one particular difference: the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target. Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other method of total-capacity testing, our previous performance results were rough estimates at best.

Our test results were obtained after each SSD had been prepared using DISKPART or Sanitary Erase tools. As a word of caution, applications such as these offer immediate but temporary restoration of original ‘pristine’ performance levels. In our tests, we discovered that the maximum performance results (charted) would decay as subsequent tests were performed. SSDs attached to TRIM enabled Operating Systems will benefit from continuously refreshed performance, whereas older O/S’s will require a garbage collection (GC) tool to avoid ‘dirty NAND’ performance degradation.

It’s critically important to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in a comparable fashion. Synthetic benchmark tools such as ATTO Disk Benchmark and Iometer are helpful indicators, but should not be considered the ultimate determining factor. That factor should be measured in actual user experience of real-world applications. Benchmark Reviews includes both bandwidth benchmarks and application speed tests to present a conclusive measurement of product performance.

Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M7 Socket LGA 1151
Processor: 4.0GHz Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU
System Memory: 16GB DDR4 2133MHz
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10

The following storage hardware has been used in our benchmark performance testing, and may be included in portions of this article:

AS SSD Benchmark 1.6.4067.34354: Multi-purpose speed and operational performance test
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46: Spot-tests static file size chunks for basic I/O bandwidth
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1a by Crystal Dew World: Sequential speed benchmark spot-tests various file size chunks
Iometer 1.1.0 (built 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation: Tests IOPS performance and I/O response time
Finalwire AIDA64: Disk Benchmark component tests linear read and write bandwidth speeds
Futuremark PCMark Vantage: HDD Benchmark Suite tests real-world drive performance

This article utilizes benchmark software tools to produce operational IOPS performance and bandwidth speed results. Each test was conducted in a specific fashion, and repeated for all products. These test results are not comparable to any other benchmark application, neither on this website or another, regardless of similar IOPS or MB/s terminology in the scores. The test results in this project are only intended to be compared to the other test results conducted in identical fashion for this article.

Alex Schepeljanski of Alex Intelligent Software develops the free AS SSD Benchmark utility for testing storage devices. The AS SSD Benchmark tests sequential read and write speeds, input/output operational performance, and response times.

AS-SSD Benchmark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds may be reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

Beginning with sequential transfer performance, the OCZ Trion 150 solid state drive produced good results: over 464MB/s for sequential reads and an outstanding 529MB/s for sequential writes. The 4K-64 thread test we concentrate on in this benchmark produced a somewhat disappointing 131MB/s reads and 314MB/s writes.

OCZ Trion 150 Results

The chart below summarizes AS-SSD 64-thread 4KB IOPS performance results among a variety of enthusiast-level SSDs. While the write results were good, the read results placed this drive at the bottom of the chart.

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests transfer rates using ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

480GB OCZ Trion 150 ATTO Benchmark Results

OCZ’s TRN150-25SAT3-480G returns a much better score in this benchmark, beating out some MLC drives. The peak read speed of 560MB/s is very close to the throughput limit of a SATA6 connection.

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool…

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested, and all drives are formatted with NTFS on the Intel P67 chipset configured to use AHCI-mode. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

CrystalDiskMark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds are reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 reports single-threaded sequential speeds reaching 553MB/s reads and 511MB/s writes. 4K tests at a queue depth of 32 produced 362MB/s read and 357MB/s write performance.

480GB OCZ Trion 150 SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults

The chart below summarizes 4K random transfer speeds with a command queue depth of 32. The Trion 150 shows excellent results only a little off the pace of the top-rated Samsung 850 EVO.

In the next section, we continue our testing using Iometer to measure input/output performance…

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and formerly known as “Galileo”. Intel has discontinued work on Iometer, and has gifted it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). There is currently a new version of Iometer in beta form, which adds several new test dimensions for SSDs.

Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.

To measure random I/O response time as well as total I/O’s per second, Iometer is set to use 4KB file size chunks over a 100% random sequential distribution at a queue depth of 32 outstanding I/O’s per target. The tests are given a 50% read and 50% write distribution. While this pattern may not match traditional ‘server’ or ‘workstation’ profiles, it illustrates a single point of reference relative to our product field.

All of our SSD tests used Iometer 1.1.0 (build 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation to measure IOPS performance. Iometer is configured to use 32 outstanding I/O’s per target and random 50/50 read/write distributionconfiguration: 4KB 100 Random 50-50 Read and Write.icf. The chart below illustrates combined random read and write IOPS over a 120-second Iometer test phase, where highest I/O total is preferred:

Random iOPS are a weak point of most TLC drives, Samsung’s Evo 850 notwithstanding. Still, the Trion 150 turns in more than double the performance of the MyDigitalSSD BP5e on this test, so that’s real progress.

In our next section, we test linear read and write bandwidth performance and compare the speed of the BP5e SSD against several other top storage products using the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark.

Many enthusiasts are familiar with the Finalwire AIDA64 benchmark suite, but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The AIDA64 Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. One of the advantages SSDs have over traditional spinning-platter hard disks is much more consistent bandwidth: hard disk bandwidth drops off as the capacity draws linear read/write speed down into the inner-portion of the disk platter. AIDA64 Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting.

Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn’t an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don’t suffer this problem).

We run the AIDA64 linear read and write tests with a 1M block size. Charted above, read performance on the 480GB OCZ Trion SSD returned average speeds of 520.4MB/s.

AIDA64 linear write-to tests were next…

This is an interesting result. The initial speed of almost 500MB/s occurs until the relatively small 256MB cache is filled, then performance drops to an average of about 284MB/s. This drop in performance for sustained writes is typical of SSDs based on TLC memory, but this is still a very good result for this class of drives.

The chart below shows the average linear read and write bandwidth speeds for a cross-section of storage devices tested with AIDA64. Ranked by linear read results, the Trion 150 is a chart-topper…but notice the write results are significantly lower than those of many other drives.

Linear tests are an important tool for comparing bandwidth speed between storage products, serve to highlight the consistent-bandwidth advantages of SSDs, which don’t suffer the performance drop-off that HDDs do as the test proceeds away from the fast outer edge of the disk.

In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance…

PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows 7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article.

PCMark Vantage runs eight different storage benchmarks, each with a specific purpose. Once testing is complete, results are given a PCMark score while and detailed results indicate actual transaction speeds. Since it simulates real-world consumer workloads, Vantage gives much more weight to read speeds, and fast iOPS are not as important as they would be in a server or other business environment. With a score of 80999, the Trion 150 is one of the highest scoring drives we’ve ever tested on this benchmark.

480GB OCZ Trion 150 SATA SSD PCMark VantageResults

In the next section, I share my review conclusion and final product rating.

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions.

See that caveat in the previous paragraph about market conditions changing? That has never been more true! Even in the fast changing consumer electronics market, the drop in SSD prices and increase in performance over the last year has been astonishing. The advent of competitive TLC NAND drives, which has been pretty much the exclusive province of the Samsung 850 EVO series since late 2014, is especially good for the consumer.

While it’s less expensive than MLC NAND, TLC NAND has slower writes, lower iOPS, and less endurance– that is, a TLC NAND drive will wear out before an MLC drive. But new controllers and drive architectures are addressing these problems. The OCZ Trion 150 drive that’s the subject of this review has 16 NAND chips, twice as many as I’d normally expect in a 512GB-class drive. I suspect that’s so the controller can write to more chips at once, which would explain the boost in sustained write speeds. Other tricks like on-board cache RAM, or Samsung’s “RAPID” driver that allocates part of your system RAM as cache, can help to.

All these technical details aside, the points to take away are that TLC drives are less expensive than MLC drives, and the performance gap is narrowing dramatically, and the remaining performance deficits relative to MLC drives in general won’t be noticeable in consumer use. If 46K random iOPS is only about half what the best MLC SATA SSDs are capable of, well, I can pretty much guarantee that your gaming box isn’t ever going to get close to even that number, so who cares?

The lower endurance of TLC NAND– how many times it can be erased and re-written– is reflected in the drive’s 3-year warranty, which is on the low side compared to its MLC competition; but 120TB of writes is, as previously mentioned, rather a lot of data. By the time this drive dies you’ll be able to pick up a better replacement for a fraction of the cost. Realistically this drive will last many years in most consumer systems.

So this drive offers a low price and excellent performance– aside from an oddly low score in the AS-SSD benchmark. But the problem is the Samsung 850 EVO, whose price has dropped dramatically in the last few months. In this case, the $140 price for this drive (Amazon) is going up against the $159.99 price of a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO (Newegg). And that extra $20 gets you 20 more gigabytes of capacity, a 5 year warranty as compared to a 3 year warranty, and utility software to migrate your existing Windows installation to the new drive. Unless you’re really pinching pennies, the Samsung is a compelling option, especially if you don’t mind devoting a few gigabytes of system RAM for a cache.

Remember, though, that volatile SSD pricing. Between the time I started this review and the time I’m typing this, the price of the 480GB Trion 150 dropped about $15 (while the price of the 960GB jumped up about $40), so ratings for drives based on price/performance are in a constant state of flux. Use our test results to inform your decision, then check current prices to help you home in on the best drive for you.

The OCZ Trion 150 SSD is available in several capacities: 120GB $45.99 (Amazon) 240GB $69.99 (Amazon), 480GB $139.99 (Amazon), 960GB: $269.99 (Amazon. But while the price and performance of this drive are good, the competition is pressing hard, and buyers should check current prices and features before making a decision.

+ Low, albeit not the lowest, cost for high capacity SSDs
+ Supports TRIM, NCQ, and RAID
+ New Toshiba controller and NAND provide exceptional performance in most applications

– Performance still not as good as MLC drives, especially in iOPS
– No included utility or migration software
– Only a 3-year warranty

Performance: 8.75
Appearance: 8.00
Construction: 9.00
Functionality: 8.00
Value: 8.50

Recommended: Benchmark Reviews Seal of Approval.

COMMENT QUESTION: Which brand of SSD do you trust most?

By David Ramsey

OCZ Trion 150 Results

480GB OCZ Trion 150 ATTO Benchmark Results

480GB OCZ Trion 150 SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults

480GB OCZ Trion 150 SATA SSD PCMark VantageResults

Recommended: Benchmark Reviews Seal of Approval.

By David Ramsey

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