The OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on April 1, 2016 8:00 AM ESTPerformance Consistency
Our performance consistency test explores the extent to which a drive can reliably sustain performance during a long-duration random write test. Specifications for consumer drives typically list peak performance numbers only attainable in ideal conditions. The performance in a worst-case scenario can be drastically different as over the course of a long test drives can run out of spare area, have to start performing garbage collection, and sometimes even reach power or thermal limits.
In addition to an overall decline in performance, a long test can show patterns in how performance varies on shorter timescales. Some drives will exhibit very little variance in performance from second to second, while others will show massive drops in performance during each garbage collection cycle but otherwise maintain good performance, and others show constantly wide variance. If a drive periodically slows to hard drive levels of performance, it may feel slow to use even if its overall average performance is very high.
To maximally stress the drive's controller and force it to perform garbage collection and wear leveling, this test conducts 4kB random writes with a queue depth of 32. The drive is filled before the start of the test, and the test duration is one hour. Any spare area will be exhausted early in the test and by the end of the hour even the largest drives with the most overprovisioning will have reached a steady state. We use the last 400 seconds of the test to score the drive both on steady-state average writes per second and on its performance divided by the standard deviation.
The Trion 150 substantially improves steady-state performance over its predecessor. The middle 480GB capacity is once again the best-performing size by a wide margin.
The Trion 150's consistency score has climbed out of the gutter—aided somewhat by the improved average performance, but there's clearly been a major change in behavior for the drive firmware that reduces the variability of write performance. The Trion 150 scores much better than any other budget drive.
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After a very short initial burst of high performance due to SLC write caching, the Trion 150 settles into a pattern of decent but broadly variable performance as it burns through the remaining spare area. Once the spare area is exhausted the behavior changes completely and the drive is very steady, transitioning between a handful of discrete performance levels.
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Looking closer at the steady-state phase, the transitions between performance states are very clear and abrupt, and there are no outliers in either direction. The performance with manual overprovisioning is substantially higher and the consistency is only slightly worse. In either case, the consistency is as good as we could ask for and a big improvement over the earlier Trion 100.
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Hulk - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
So I might be doing this calc wrong but I'm seeing the endurance as 250 drive writes? Probably fine for most people and definitely for a media storage drive. Prices are getting low enough for that.stephenbrooks - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
I'd prefer it if they just stated endurance in drive writes rather than as 9,876PB or something. I end up doing the mental arithmetic to divide it down to drive writes every time I see that in the table anyway.nikon133 - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
I got one 480GB Trion 100 for my old Elitebook upgrade.I knew what I'm buying and I am very pleased with it. Here in NZ, I paid 480GB Trion around NZ$30 more than what I would pay for 250GB Samsug 850 EVO (non-pro): they were NZ$150 and 180. I wanted more capacity but didn't want to overspend for machine I rarely use these days.
While it is slow for SSD, it still is revelation in everyday use, compared to HDD. Windows 10 boot time is quick anyway, and SSD takes away all that after-login sluggishness while system is still loading background processes/drivers/utils/...
Like I said, champ it is not, but huge improvement over HDD it is.
SeanJ76 - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
Your pretty damn poor if you can't afford a Intel SSD. Intel will always make the best SSD on the market, they've been in the business the longest!xrror - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
I'm sure glad that brand loyalty makes you a consumer retard. Never compare, never revisit your set opinions. Way to be a true patriot. =(nikon133 - Monday, April 11, 2016 - link
Well said.slowdemon21 - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link
I'm using in PS4 with great resultsprefereduser - Friday, June 3, 2016 - link
OCZ Trion 150 SSD 120GB benchmarks Athon II x4 845 4 GB ramWindows 10 clean install on a Sata III port .
Seq R/W is 130.30 MB/s and 107.29 MB/s respectively
4K = 15.37 MB/s read and 20.71 MB/s
4K -64 Thrd read = 25.55 MB/s write = 52.01 MB/s
Acc. time = 0.274ms read and 0.141ms write
I was looking for more than that (maybe twice or more on seq r/w at least ) but not as much as the i7 test box here even though this is low end part .
OTOH it feels *a lot faster the the not old 1TB 5700 rpm metal hdd ever did and def rag is disabled in windows 10 . .
What you think?
hp79 - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
Is this different from OCZ TR150 (current model)? Looking at the specification of the 480GB on their website (https://ocz.com/us/ssd/tr150-ssd#specs), they are quite different from the TRION 150 480GB in this table. The 4K Write shows up to 83K IOPS instead of the 54K IOPS shown in the table. Others numbers are close though.I have a Trion 150 480GB which I paid $60 at Frys during an awesome sale (probably pricing error). Working very well for my laptop working as a HTPC/home file server.