OCZ Trion 100 480 GB SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The Trion 100 series is the lowest cost entry-level SSD offered by OCZ and it features an all Toshiba design inside with TLC NAND Flash memory. Our performance numbers showed that the drive had solid read performance, but the write performance was a littler lower than we hoped for. Mixed performance workloads also proved difficult for the OCZ Trion 100 480GB SSD and that was clearly shown in the 128KB sequential and 4KB random read/write tests. We shared our performance results with OCZ several days ago and didn’t disagree with our performance numbers and were unable to give any details on the architecture of Toshiba TC58 controller. From what our testing shows this drive has some form of SLC mode and you’ll get higher speeds when writing to that and then you’ll see a drop in performance over extended tests. We saw this after we ran a secure erase on the OCZ Trion 100 480GB drive and then ran a 128KB sequential write across the entire drive.
The OCZ SSD Trion 100 480GB SSD was writing data at over 500 MB/s for about 6 seconds and then dropped down to 100-160 MB/s, which means that this drive has a SLC buffer that is around 3GB in size if we had to take a wild guess. Since we are doing a long sustained period of writes that exceeds the buffer size we were able to see the difference in writing to the SLC buffer and then straight to the TLC portion of the drive once the SLC is full. This is similar to how the Samsung SSD 840 EVO and 850 EVO series operate as they had a feature called TurboWrite where a small portion of the NAND was run in SLC mode with similar performance results. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive doesn’t exhibit the same behavior though as you can see from the chart above. This is likely due to the caching algorithm differences and of course the entirely different controller and NAND Flash.
OCZ Trion 100 SSD Series Pricing on July 9th, 2015
| OCZ Trion 100 SSD Series | Model Number | SRP | Amazon Price | $/GB |
| Trion 100 120GB | TRN100-25SAT3-120G | $56.99 | $59.99 | $0.50 per GB |
| Trion 100 240GB | TRN100-25SAT3-240G | $87.99 | $89.99 | $0.37 per GB |
| Trion 100 480GB | TRN100-25SAT3-480G | $184.99 | $179.99 | $0.37 per GB |
| Trion 100 960GB | TRN100-25SAT3-960G | $369.99 | $359.99 | $0.37 per GB |
When it comes to pricing the OCZ Trion 100 480GB SSD with a 3-year warranty runs $179.99 shipped at Amazon. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive runs $161.99 shipped and is backed by a longer 5-year warranty. The OCZ Arc 100 480GB drive with MLC NAND Flash is priced at $169.99 shipped, so you can get OCZ’s ‘value’ MLC SSD for less money than the ‘value’ TLC SSD. That doesn’t make sense to us and hopefully the pricing on the OCZ Trion 100 series will settle down after the drive has been out for a number of weeks. The pricing makes no sense to use right now as we’ve pick the ARC 100 over the Trion 100.
At the end of the day we found the Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB to be a faster overall drive, with a longer warranty, support for encryption, less power usage, a larger TBW rating and most important to consumers, a lower price. The OCZ Trion 100 480GB drive is a decent entry-level drive, but it was clearly outclassed by the Samsung SSD EVO that was released in December 2014. We were hoping that OCZ would be a little more competitive with the OCZ Trion 100 Series with their first all Toshiba and TLC Nand Flash drive, but that wasn’t the case today.
Legit Bottom Line: The OCZ Trion 100 480GB SSD is coming late to the TLC SSD market and it just doesn’t have what is needed to overtake the Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive.