OCZ Trion 100 SSD: Bringing flash performance to the masses

A New TLC Entry

Prices of SSDs have fallen to new lows and there has never been a better time to upgrade. Over a year ago, a 120GB or 128GB SSD would have set you back roughly S$140. Today, a 240GB or 256GB SSD can be had for almost the same amount. Prices have halved. The reason for this is two-fold, fierce competition from SSD and NAND manufacturers and also improved technology and processes in manufacturing NAND memory.

Currently, there are three main types of NAND memory employed in SSDs - MLC NAND, TLC NAND, and 3D V-NAND. 3D V-NAND is the most cutting edge as it stacks memory cells on top of each other to solve the fundamental problems of existing 2D planar architecture. We talked about this in detail in our review of the Samsung SSD 850 Pro. However, it also commands a sizable premium. Presently, only Samsung is shipping consumer 3D V-NAND drives.

Beyond 3D V-NAND, there are MLC and TLC NAND, which can be said to represent two schools of thought. We have elaborated about this in our initial review of the Samsung SSD 840 Evo, but for those who are not familiar with that review and the SSD 840 Evo, let us recap here briefly.

In the chase to increase affordability of MLC NAND, manufacturers have been trying to increase storage density by cramming more bits of data onto memory cells. On way to do so is to rely on smaller process nodes and smaller memory cells. This allows data to be stored on increasingly smaller areas on the die. But there’s a limit to this, and we are fast approaching it.

The second way is TLC NAND, which increases the amount of data stored in a single cell. As its name suggest, TLC NAND stores 3 bits of data per cell as opposed to MLC NAND’s 2 bits per cell. You can’t have your cake and eat it, however, and TLC NAND suffers from poorer performance and endurance. Fortunately, its shortcomings can be mitigated by clever caching technologies and firmware.

Before today, there were only two brands that was offering TLC NAND drives to consumers and they are Samsung and Sandisk, with the former being the more aggressive of the two. It proved to be a smart move and its SSD 840 Evo drive was exceedingly popular, which is not surprisingly at all once you consider its price and performance characteristics. Now, however, there’s a new challenger in town and that’s the drive here, OCZ’s new Trion 100 SSD.

The Trion 100

When Toshiba acquired OCZ early last year, we were excited about what it could mean. Apart from Samsung, Intel and Micron, Toshiba was the only other SSD manufacturer in the business to own its own NAND production facilities. And this coupled with OCZ’s expertise in developing high-end controllers, could potentially bring about more exciting drives. And thus far, what we have seen from OCZ - Vertex 460 and the more recent Vector 180 - were just minor refreshes to their existing lineup, which is why the Trion 100 SSD is so exciting.

To better understand the Trion 100 SSD, it’s necessary to know where it sits in OCZ’s current lineup of drives. In a meeting with folks from OCZ, we were told that the Trion 100 SSD will be OCZ’s most basic entry-level drive and will come in below the ARC 100. The two drives will continue to coexist as the ARC100 is sufficiently different in performance and pricing to warrant that. In essence, the Trion 100 SSD is OCZ’s most affordable drive, while the ARC 100 will continue to offer users the option if they should want a little more zing in their drives, but are not quite willing to open their wallets up to a Vector or Vertex drive.

Apart from being the first all-new drive to be released after the acquisition, the Trion 100 is also the first OCZ drive to employ the use of TLC NAND, specifically Toshiba’s new A19nm TLC NAND, which is manufactured using a 19nm process node. There are also plans to shift to Toshiba’s newer 15nm process, once production ramps up and yields are high enough.

As for endurance, OCZ is quoting daily writes of up to 55GB a day or 60TB total writes for the 240GB version. As we have mentioned in the past, 55GB a day is plenty for mainstream users as consumer workloads typically vary between only 10GB to 30GB a day. For comparison, Samsung is quoting 75TB total writes for its 240GB SSD 850 Evo drive, but remember, this drive is based on the latest 3D V-NAND architecture which purports to offer much higher endurance.

For the controller, OCZ is turning to parent company Toshiba and the Trion 100 is the first OCZ drive in a while to not use OCZ’s own Barefoot 3 controller. Since the controller is from Toshiba, we were not able to get much details, so at this point we are unsure if it makes use of any caching technologies to help boost performance. What we do know however is that the decision to go with a Toshiba controller is mainly because of the Barefoot 3’s inability to properly support TLC NAND. But beyond that, the new controller also offers some improvements.

One key improvement that this new controller brings is support for more aggressive DevSleep and power saving modes. In DevSleep and idle modes, we are looking at figures of just 6mW and 830mW respectively. OCZ drives based on the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller could only muster idle power consumption figures in the region of 0.6W at best. These improved figures would benefit notebook users greatly. Unfortunately, the new controller does not support hardware encryption, which is a pity because it a feature that we are seeing being implemented on more entry-level drives lately.

In terms of packaging, unlike its more premium Vertex and Vector siblings, the Trion 100 does not come with any accessories or utilities. On top of this, OCZ has also revised the drive chassis, so that it is less heavy than older OCZ models. This should be good news to notebook upgraders who found OCZ's older drives unnecessarily heavy. The Trion 100 is also compatible with OCZ's new SSD Guru management utility, which makes it easy to update the drive's firmware, check its health status and more.

All in all, the new Trion 100 SSD is really a OCZ-branded Toshiba drive. In fact, in press materials we were sent, the Trion 100 SSD has been marketed as a “100% Toshiba drive” with “100% validation by OCZ”. It seems to us then that Toshiba wishes to leverage OCZ’s heritage and strong branding in the consumer SSD space to gain a larger share of the mainstream consumer market. And in all honesty, there’s nothing wrong with that - after all, this was perhaps one of the key reasons why Toshiba acquired OCZ in the first place.

Test Setup

The OCZ Trion 100 will be tested on our dedicated storage testbed:

• Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
• 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7

Our revised benchmark ditches older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also includes an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance. The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
• Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

Since the OCZ Trion SSD employs TLC NAND, we will be looking at how it compares against similar offerings from Samsung, specifically the SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo. Additionally, we are interested to see how it matches up against other entry-level offerings such as the OCZ ARC 100 and Corsair Force LX.

Here is the list of drives tested:

• OCZ Trion 100
• OCZ ARC 100
• Samsung SSD 840 Evo
• Samsung SSD 850 Evo
• Crucial MX100
• Plextor M6S
• Corsair Force LX
• Samsung SSD 850 Pro

Timing tests

The timing tests are our evaluation of how the SSDs will perform in real-world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously; they include resource-intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro, amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.

Considering the OCZ Trion 100’s positioning, its recorded timings in our timing tests were inline with our expectations. Looking at its timings, it is clearly one of the slowest drives. However, if one was to compare its timings with that of the fastest drive - the Samsung SSD 850 Pro - you will see that the difference is not actually all that great. If we were to focus on just raw results, it was probably about 10% slower, which is certainly quite significant. But in the real world, this would translate to about 2 to 3 seconds, which isn’t a great deal and most people would be hard pressed to notice. Also, its timings were not that far off from the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo. 

PCMark 7 results

PCMark 7 is a benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.

Unfortunately for the OCZ Trion 100, its score of 5166 was the lowest on PCMark 7. That said, the difference between it and the ARC 100 was just only 1%. But there’s a larger gulf when compared to the two TLC NAND drives from Samsung. The SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo scored about 8% and 5% better respectively. Looking at the breakdown, we can see that the Trion 100 trailed badly in the Starting Applications workload, which could also explain why it did poorly in the Apps Launching scenario in our earlier timing tests benchmark. 

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results

CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data. 

The OCZ Trion 100 SSD got off to a bright start on CrystalDiskMark and recorded very respectable sequential read and write speeds that easily saw off the OCZ ARC 100. Its sequential read speeds even surpassed that of the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840, as well as other mainstream drives like the Crucial MX100 and Plextor M6S. However, as we moved on to other workloads, its performance, especially write performance, suffered. Its 512K write performance was just 233MB/s, nearly just half that of the OCZ ARC 100 and Samsung SSD 840 Evo. Its showings on 4K and 4K, 32 queue depth workloads were also not encouraging. Write performance on the 4K, 32 queue depth workload was especially dismal, managing just 161.6MB/s, which was only about 44% of what drives like the OCZ ARC 100 and Samsung SSD 850 Evo could muster. 

AS SSD 1.7.4739 results

AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using the SandForce SF-2281 controller cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of the strong advantages of this controller. Therefore, this is a useful benchmark because drives that use the SF-2281 controller or similar won't gain an upper hand.

We begin with AS SSD’s copy benchmark and the numbers were quite disappointing. The OCZ Trion 100’s ISO copy speeds were decent and aligned with the other entry levels drives, but then it tanked considerably when it came to Program and Game.

Moving on, we saw the OCZ Trion 100 excelling in the sequential read and write workload, managing very high read speeds and respectable write speeds. It continued its fine form in the 4K workload, as it saw off challenges from the Plextor M6S and Corsair Force LX. However, it was no match for the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo. However, on the intensive 4K, 64 queue depth workload, we saw that although the Trion 100 managed to maintain very good read speeds, its write speeds took a huge hit and managed only just 107.31MB/s. It seems then that the OCZ Trion 100’s Toshiba controller does employ some form of write caching, which could explain why write speeds suffered at high queue depths where its cache ran out of memory to maintain performance. 

Iometer results (Part 1)

Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face. Iometer is an intensive benchmark and considering the OCZ Trion 100’s humble positioning, we were not surprised to see that its performance here was not that great. It got off to a good start on the 64K streaming reads workload, but its performance was pretty dismal when we moved on to the 64K streaming writes workload. Here we can clearly see the shortcomings of TLC NAND when it comes to write performance. Performance on the File Server workload was not great either and we can see that the three TLC NAND drives - the OCZ Trion 100 and the Samsung SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo - were the clear under-performers.

Iometer results (Part 2)

Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. Looking at the graphs here, we can see that the OCZ Trion 100 was slower to respond than other mainstream drives. In particular, in the streaming writes workload, it was considerably slower and its speed suffered greatly as queue depth increased.

Your ticket to the world of SSDs

Vertical integration has many benefits if you are in the SSD business. This can be clearly seen from Samsung’s most recent offerings. They were the first to offer to consumers TLC NAND drives and also 3D V-NAND drives, giving them a clear advantage in both the high-end and mainstream space. And as of now, the only other manufacturer that can pose a significant challenge to them is arguably OCZ and Toshiba.

Unlike other major players like Micron and SanDisk, OCZ has experience in developing its own controller. The same can be said for Intel too, but their NAND foundries are a joint venture with Micron, and not to mention that they seem to be more focused in the enterprise space. The all-new Trion 100 SSD is therefore a very interesting addition to OCZ’s line-up and is also the first all-new drive to be released after Toshiba’s acquisition of the former.

From a performance standpoint, the Trion 100 SSD does not raise any eyebrows. As OCZ’s most affordable drive, its performance is likewise equally basic. Without any details about the Toshiba’s controllers workings, we cannot definitively say anything about its performance other than to say that it has decent read performance, but poor write performance. Looking at the results, especially those with high queue depths, we are guessing that there is some kind of caching technology at work. But even with it, its overall performance was not very compelling and certainly trails Samsung’s SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo by a considerable margin. In the real world, however, you might be hard pressed to notice the difference, especially if all you do is simple web browsing, word processing and the occasional photo and video editing. 

But even though performance was disappointing, the OCZ Trion 100 does have one really big thing going for it and that’s price. With a recommended retail price of just S$135 for the 240GB model that we reviewed here, the Trion 100 SSD is easily one of the most affordable drives in the market today - that’s 56 cents per gigabyte, by the way. In comparison, the Samsung SSD 850 Evo of a similar capacity is going to set you back 25% more at S$169, but then the Samsung drive is comfortably quicker. But if we were to look at popular entry-level options like Crucial’s new BX100, the Trion 100 still looks like very good value as the former is 14% or S$20 more.

Furthermore, claimed endurance figures from OCZ are also good and well within the acceptable range based on client usage patterns. And then there’s the standard 3-year warranty. For users living in other regions such as the U.S., E.U. and Taiwan, there’s also the added benefit of OCZ’s ShieldPlus warranty program. The ShieldPlus program aims to reduce downtime for users affected by faulty drives by sending out a replacement drive first, while collecting the faulty drive back later - the replacement drive will contain a mailer for users to send the faulty drive back. Unfortunately, this program is available only in the aforementioned regions at this time. But plans are in the place to expand this program and we were told that Singapore is high on OCZ’s list for implementation.

At the end of the day, the OCZ Trion 100 SSD is a basic entry-level SSD that is great for users who want to get a taste of what SSD performance is like. For the longest time, we have championed SSDs as the ultimate system upgrade to have, especially if you are still chugging along on a mechanical hard disk drive. And if you have been sitting on the fence because of prices, the attractive price of Trion 100 SSD should go a long way in getting you to open up your wallets and taking that first step into the world of SSDs.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.