OCZ Trion 100 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Bringing Toshiba to the Retail

Final 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.

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.