OCZ Trion 100 240GB and 480GB SSD

1. Introduction2. OCZ Trion 100 240GB and 480GB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMETER8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

Today we look at the new OCZ Trion 100 drive, in 240GB and 480GB capacities. These drives are designed to deliver excellent all round performance while being very cost effective at £60.99 and £124.99 inc vat respectively. This is also the first 100% Toshiba based OCZ SSD featuring a Toshiba controller and A19 TLC NAND flash.

The OCZ Trion 100 drives are shipped inside a 7mm chassis for complete compatibility with ultra thin notebooks. The 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB models ship with A19 TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND flash and are covered under the OCZ ShieldPlus Warranty system. This warranty cover offers a free return postage system with advanced drive replacement. You simply provide the SSD's serial number and if OCZ determine the drive to be defective, you get a brand new replacement with a paid return shipping label for the faulty drive.

Each Trion 100 drive has a different Total Bytes Written (TBW) endurance rating. The 120GB model is rated at 27GB/day, the 240GB model 55GB/day, 480GB model 110 GB/day and the 960GB model 219GB/day. They are classed as ‘value' level drives in OCZ's own portfolio, underneath gamer, mainstream and entry level.



The packaging for the Trion 100 drives is very simple – a high resolution image of the product can be seen on the front of the box, along with the capacity, bottom right.

The rear of the box has more detailed specifications – some of which we listed on the previous page.


As these drives are aimed at the budget audience, there are no accessories or extras to list.


Both drives ship in the same pale chassis with an OCZ sticker visible on the front of the case. Opening this particular chassis is easy enough, simply pop open with a flat head screwdriver.

Both drives are built on a tiny little PCB which only takes up part of the space inside the chassis.


The images above show the 240GB drive (top row) and the 480GB (bottom row). The larger drive has twice as many NAND flash chips installed, although one side of the PCB is completely spartan in both capacities, as shown above. The controller is made in house by Toshiba, model number TC58NC1000GSB-00. There is a NANYA SDRAM chip installed, model NT5CC128M16FP-D1 on the 240GB model and NT5CC256M16DP-D1 on the 480GB model.


OCZ's SSD Guru is a useful piece of software that offers a lot of control over the drives. You can perform a secure erase, check for BIOS updates and analyse temperatures, check SMART status and check interface parameters and health.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 3

Other Drives
SK hynix SC300 256GB
Micron M600 256GB
Apotop S3C 256GB
Angelbird 512GB wrk
Hynix SH920/910A
OCZ ARC 100 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Intel 520 Series 240GB
Intel 730 240GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
OCZ Vector 150 256GB
OCZ Vector 240GB
OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (1.4 fw)
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Intel 730 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SDD
SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
OCZ Agility 4 256GB
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS
ADATA S510 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter.

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.


Overall performance is quite good considering the budget price point. both drives hit 520MB/s sequential read. The 480GB drive peaks at around 500 MB/s sequential write, while the 240GB drive around 472 MB/s.

The drives score very well in both compressible and incompressible tests although the 480GB drive clearly delivers better results in the 4K QD32 write test.


Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.


Read and write performance is excellent in this test, hitting over 560MB/s in the read test and between 528-525MB/s in the write test.


Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.


AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data, and we can see the proprietary Toshiba controller performs very well in this situation. The 480GB drive comes out top in this test, by a small margin.

Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.



OCZ get their 4k performance figures from CrystalDiskmark, but we use a different, slightly more intensive methodology to get our own figures – from IOMETER. The 4K random read results are very close to the OCZ claims of 90,000 although our own 4k random write results of 30,128 and 22,981 fall short of the 54,000 and 43,000 claims for the 480GB and 240GB drive respectively.
OCZ have been focusing lately on their higher spec gamer and enthusiast solid state drives, so the introduction of a low cost budget model in the ‘value' range makes sense.

The new Trion 100 drives are capable performers, and are priced very competitively in order to target the widest possible audience.

The Trion 100 is a first for OCZ in a handful of categories. It is the companies first TLC SSD and it is the first consumer SSD on the market which features Toshiba's A19 TLC NAND flash. It is also the first drive OCZ have created which features DevSleep support, meaning it is ideal for mobile applications.

In this sector pricing is critical to success, especially when factoring in the popularity of the latest Samsung 850 drives. Quickly checking Amazon shows the Samsung 250GB 850 Evo is selling for £74.35 inc vat. The 500GB 850 Evo is £149.99 inc vat. OCZ told me that the Trion 100 240GB will hit retail at £60.99 and the 480GB £124.99. These are certainly competitively priced, even against the biggest market leader.

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Pros:

• Good with both incompressible and compressible data.
• 4k Random read IOPS is excellent.
• OCZ Guru software is good.

Cons:

• OCZ face a saturated marketplace in the budget sector.

KitGuru says: The OCZ Trion 100 is a well balanced drive which delvers strong results with both compressible and incompressible data. They also hit aggressive price points.

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