OCZ launches Trion 150 SSDs

Toshiba has today officially launched the new OCZ Trion 150 series of SSDs.

First showcased at CES 2016 in January this year, the Trion 150 SSDs are a direct replacement for the Trion 100 series that launched in Q3 2015. The new series will retain the same market positioning as the company's value SATA SSD that targets consumers looking to purchase their first SSD and upgrade from traditional hard drives. As such, the advertised benefits are things universal to SSDs such as improved responsiveness, faster multitasking and quicker boot times.

'Our Trion 100 series solid state drives quickly became a top seller for us and are popular among end users seeking a performance boost over hard drives at a very reasonable price,' said Steve Fingerhut, Sr. Vice President and GM of SSD BU, at Toshiba America Electronics Corporation. 'We are continually looking for ways to improve both SSD real world performance and value to end users and are pleased to introduce the new Trion 150 series which leverages the latest Toshiba 15nm Triple-Level Cell NAND flash to deliver an even better storage solution for value oriented mobile and desktop users.'

As Steve says, the key difference between the drives is that the Trion 150 is using Toshiba's new 15nm TLC NAND, whereas the outgoing Trion 100 uses the older 19nm variety. Although pricing has not been confirmed, OCZ says it's likely to be on par with, if not lower than, the Trion 100 series. A shrink in die size should equate to lower production costs since you're producing more NAND per wafer. Hopefully, these savings will be passed onto the consumer as price was our major gripe with the Trion 100 in our original review.

While Toshiba is also claiming improvements to real-world performance, no further details are given. Any boosts are likely down to tweaks to the firmware, as besides the NAND the remaining hardware is carried over from the Trion 100, including the Toshiba TC58 controller.

The Trion 150 comes in the same four capacities (120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB) and is presented in the same 2.5in 7mm high form factor using the SATA 6Gbps interface, although the new drives do have an updated look.

This is a quiet launch, with few, if any, samples being handed out to press. This is unsurprising since the quoted specifications remain identical for all four capacities. These include peak sequential read speeds of 550MB/sec and sequential write speeds up to 530MB/sec. Like many TLC drives, the Trion 150 SSDs rely on a pseudo-SLC cache to improve write performance. While the size and performance of this cache is the same as it was before, the speed when writing directly to the TLC NAND (i.e. once the cache is exceeded) is said to have almost doubled - previously this was a paltry 90MB/sec or so.

Despite the move to a smaller die size, endurance is also the same. It starts at 30 TBW (terabytes written) for the 120GB drive (27GB/day for the length of the three year warranty) and doubles in line with capacity up to 240 TBW (219GB/day) for the 960GB drive. The low power state DevSlp is supported and in this mode the drive is said to consume as little as 6mW, making it suitable for both notebook and desktop applications. There are no encryption or power loss features as these are not deemed relevant to the target market. Full specifications can be found on the OCZ product page.

All Trion 150 SSDs come with a 3-year Shield Plus warranty. With this, you don't need proof of purchase to file a claim, and when drives are determined to be faulty you'll receive an advanced replacement and a pre-paid return label.