A Slight Comeback that Still Falls Brusque of its Competition

There's no question that OCZ's Trion 150 improves upon the Trion 100 where it counts most: the 150 is cheaper, albeit slightly, and it's faster in nearly tests by a reasonable margin. This is all cracking news for potential buyers, but these facts alone don't necessarily mean yous should blitz out and buy the Trion 150.

We'd say that the drive missed a few opportunities. Despite being the latest TLC-based SSD series to hit the market, the Trion 150 series doesn't gear up a new tape for cost per gigabyte -- in fact, Crucial'southward questionably slow BX200 serial still holds that title.

Likewise, the Trion 150 serial doesn't gear up a new bar for affordable SSD performance as information technology was considerably slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo series in almost every test. On average it was 31% slower when measuring copy functioning, 8% slower in our awarding tests and 32% slower in the PCMark 7 benchmarks compared to the 850 Evo.

In other words, despite arriving a yr after the 850 Evo, the Trion 150 delivers nothing new, in fact information technology fails to friction match what consumers have already had admission to for 12 months.

This might not be such an issue if the Trion serial and the OCZ brand had a stiff reputation for reliability. Information technology would be worth spending the aforementioned amount of coin on a slower SSD if it offered peace of mind that yous were investing in a highly reliable production.

Unfortunately, on Amazon the Trion 100 480GB has 153 customer reviews, just 153, and of that number twenty% of them report failures within the starting time few months of apply.

If we look at the competing 850 Evo 500GB SSD nosotros discover 8272 customer reviews and yet only 3% study serious issues (which seems like a reasonable number for whatever consumer product).

Non to selection on the Trion 100 series, only Newegg's client reviews are fifty-fifty more damning.

Update: Since publishing the review OCZ has provided us boosted information regarding the Trion 100's reliability issue and nosotros've been able to confirm those claims. OCZ says that when the Trion 100 first entered the market it suffered a higher than normal render rate due to a bug in the firmware. This bug was fixed in September 2022 and since and so the return charge per unit has dropped dramatically.

OCZ believes that the reviews we commented on from Newegg and Amazon are from customers who didn't update their firmware.

Finally, OCZ says information technology has listened to both customer and reviewer feedback on Trion 100 which impacted how the company approached the architecture of Trion 150 plus. As a issue, it comes with OCZ'southward ShieldPlus warranty, so we don't expect a high rate of failure on this drive. OCZ is also very open up with return rates and posted the figures on its ain website.

When information technology comes to budget TLC SSDs, reliability is everything and this is why I bring the issue upwardly. Of grade nosotros tin't say with certainty that the Trion 150 series will suffer the same failure charge per unit, just as I imagine they might say in the business, you're simply as proficient as your concluding SSD series.

In short, at the same cost per gigabyte as the Samsung SSD 850 Evo series, nosotros see no compelling reason to buy an OCZ Trion 150 series SSD. Information technology's our hope that within the coming weeks OCZ are able to reduce the price of the Trion 150 serial to help strengthen its position.

So far the only other reviews I have seen for the Trion 150 series hail it a success and hand information technology an laurels despite producing similar findings to my ain. Am I being too hard on the Trion 150? Let me have it in the comments!

Pros: The Trion 150 brings a modest performance boost and a marginal price cut over the half-dozen-month-old Trion 100 series.

Cons: Much slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo, retreads the same basis as existing drives, questionable reliability.