OCZ Trion 100 960GB Does OCZ’s affordable new SSD stack up in a cut-throat market

OCZ’s new budgetoriented SSD comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB fl avours, with the latter in our Labs this month for testing. Notably, its OCZ’s fi rst fully Toshiba-based SSD since it was acquired by the Japanese company last year. While Toshiba does the building, OCZ performs the testing and validation. The Trion uses second-gen 128Gbit A19 TLC NAND fl ash, coupled to a Toshiba TC58 controller. The drive uses the standard 7mm thick/2.5- inch form factor, as well as the SATA 6Gbps interface. We tested read and write speeds with AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark. Sequential read and writes are fast at 539/516MB/s, but essentially capped by the SATA interface, like most modern SSDs. The Trion is rated for 90,000/54,0000 (read/write) IOPS, but random 4K performance isn’t quite as good as you see on MLC-based SSDs. Still, it’s real-world performance is solid overall for a budget SSD. As is typical, read and write speeds are slightly slower on the low-capacity drives. Endurance on the 960GB Trion over the three-year warranty period is excellent at 240TB total, or 219GB a day, though the smaller drives offer less. The Trion 100 does support low power state idle, but no hardware encryption. While it offers acceptable bang for buck, there’s nothing here that really stands out from the crowd. Hopefully prices will drop a little to make it more competitive. The 960GB model will set you back around $480, the 480GB is $249, the 240GB $129 and the 120GB just $79.