With their Trion series, OCZ shows their first drives with TLC NAND. Therefore it's rather obvious that OCZ is about to join the price wars when it comes to budget SSDs. Looking for the controller we find a chip from Toshiba and we're rather curious to find out how this drive does in our review.


Specifications / Delivery

Model	Trion 100 120 Gigabyte	Trion 100 240 Gigabyte	Trion 100 480 Gigabyte	Trion 100 960 Gigabyte
Capacity	120 GB	240 GB	480 GB	960 GB
Form Factor	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm
Memory	TLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles
Endurance	3 years @ 27 GB/day ~ 30 TBW (	3 years @ 55 GB/day ~ 60 TBW	3 years @ 110 GB/day ~ 120 TBW	3 years @ 219 GB/day ~ 240 TBW
Controller	Toshiba Alishan	Toshiba Alishan	Toshiba Alishan	Toshiba Alishan
Model	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC
Throughput	550 MB/s sequential read 450 MB/s sequential write 79'000 IOPS 4K random read 25'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 520 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 43'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 54'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 64'000 IOPS 4K random write
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise	no noise	no noise	no noise
Warranty	3 Years - Shield Plus	3 Years - Shield Plus	3 Years - Shield Plus	3 Years - Shield Plus
Price	MSRP CHF 59.90	MSRP CHF 99.90	MSRP CHF 199.90	MSRP CHF 384.99

With the Trion 100 OCZ shows their first SSD, which is based on TLC NAND flash memory. Thanks to this choice OCZ is now able to compete with entry level offerings from Samsung and Crucial. As you might know, TLC memory chips are capable of storing three bits per cell, whereas MLC can only hold two bits. The increases the capacity per NAND chip and provides the vendor with more headroom when it comes to pricing.

We were actually quite surprised to find a controller from Toshiba on these particular drives, which goes by the name TC58, or to be even more precise: TC58NC1000GSB-00. Apart from that it has been combined with TH58TET1UDKBAEG NAND flash memory, which as we already mentioned is TLC NAND. A closer look at the line-up reveals there are four different models being launched today, where there is a 120GB, a 240GB, a 480GB and a 960GB model.

A closer look at the bundle you get with the Trion 100 entry level drives, shows even clearer that OCZ wants to keep the price low. Next to the management software SSD Guru, the drives are covered by OCZ's so called Shield Plus warranty. If a customer is under the impression that a drive is defective it can be sent to OCZ. A service technicians will check if the drive is actually damaged or not. Should that be the case, the customer immediately receives a new drive, whereas return shipment costs are being covered by OCZ. In the case of the Trion the Shield Plus warranty last three years.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - Threaded Performance
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - SSD Guru
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s	Page 12 - Conclusion