OCZ Trion 100 960GB

So much SSD, so little money...

WE LIKE A LITTLE VARIETY. So it was a thumbs up from us when Toshiba picked up the smoking remains after memory specialist OCZ slammed into the bankruptcy wall. OCZ had cooked up some technically intriguing SSDs over the years—though some were a little short on polish.

What OCZ needed was some corporate-style attention to detail, the sort of quality control and validation that big companies do best. Companies like Toshiba. The result is the OCZ Trion 100, reviewed here in 960GB format.

Much of the component mix has moved to Toshiba technology. That starts with 19nm Toshiba TLC NAND memory. That’s novel for OCZ, so it ruled out the use of OCZ’s Barefoot controller chip and, in turn, prompted the change up to a Toshiba TC58 controller, which, rumor has it, is derived from Phison S10, as also seen in the Kingston HyperX Savage. The Kingston drive, of course, uses faster Toshiba MLC, rather than TLC, memory.

But, as we said, a little variety is very welcome, so the opportunity for a direct comparison between MLC and TLC memory, with ostensibly similar controller technology, is intriguing. Unfortunately, the outcome for OCZ confirms the tardy reputation of TLC memory.

It looks reasonable, if slower than the Kingston drive, in pretty much all the synthetic benchmarks. Whether it’s sequential or 4K random performance, the Trion is competitive. However, shift the focus to real-world data duties, and the wheels fall off a little. Just like other drives, we noticed an ominous drop-off in performance when transferring our test files. The internal data copy benchmark duly revealed sluggish performance.

At 4 minutes and 19 seconds for the 30GB copy, it’s nearly twice as slow as the best SATA drives, never mind the sub-one-minute performance of some of the PCIe drives. That it’s beaten by SanDisk’s budget drive in this metric says it all, and makes it very hard to recommend the Trion 100 over a similarly capacious Samsung 850 EVO. It’s not a terrible drive. It’s just not the SSD we’d buy.