OCZ Trion150 240GB and 480GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the 480GB OCZ Trion 150 can be had for $139.99 at NewEgg, £119.05 at CCL Online, or €119.86 through Geizhals. The 240GB model of the Trion 150 will set you back $69.99, £59.86, and €65.90 at the same three shops.

Conclusion

OCZ was one of the main companies to set a new standard for budget SSDs that still performed great when they released their Trion 100 series a little while ago. Now that they are back with the Trion 150 they are continuing this trend and I might as well say this right away: It is the best TLC-based SSD that I’ve tested to date.

The drive has a very basic design that resembles the previous OCZ series, but with a fresher and lighter look. The 7mm high 2.5-inch drive will fit snugly into most portable PCs as well as stationary ones and it is a great replacement option for the traditional mechanical hard disk drive. Switching from a HDD to an SSD is like switching from a bicycle to a car and it is an upgrade that every system is worthy off. Feature wise the Trion 150 series has all the basics such as Trim, SMART, and Garbage collection built-in.

The performance of the Trion 150 series is great. Of course, it can’t hold up with MLC-based drives, but it isn’t designed to do that either. The read performance is great and the write performance isn’t bad at all either – which usually is one of the weak points in TLC-based SSDs. The performance became especially visible to me during my fillage tests where I copy large amounts of data onto the drive at once in order to simulate the fill percentage. The OCZ Trion 150 stayed well above the 200 MB/s marker most of the time, despite me copying 50GB data chunks at once. But the ordinary benchmarks also showed us a great performance and the price is something that you can’t argue with.

When I condition the drives to simulate years of wear and tear, I hit the drives hard and it is something that will show on TLC based drives – which is one of the reasons that we run these tests. The only place it really showed on this drive was all the way at the end and it wasn’t massive either. There’s also a good chance that the firmware can reorganize the cells, mark the failed ones and return quite a bit of the performance again. Normally this would happen over time and not show as severe as it does due to the heavy conditioning. The chance that you’ll ever experience this, even as high-end enthusiast user that uses the computer heavy and long every day, is very little before you’ll choose to replace the drive again in 3 to 5 years.

The price is unbeatable on the European market at the moment for a drive like this and when you add the amazing ShieldPlus warranty on top of that, you know you get one of the best deals possible.

Pros

• Good performance vs. price ratio
• Perfect drive as fast HDD replacement
• Latest TLC technology
• 100% Toshiba technology (besides cache buffer)
• 3-Year ShieldPlus Warranty

Cons

• Not the same endurance as MLC-based drives

“If you haven’t had the itch to make the switch, it’s about time. The OCZ Trion 150 provides an amazing performance vs. price ratio and it’s also backed by the best drive warranty on the market.”

Thank you OCZ for providing us with these samples.