OCZ Trion 150 SSD Review: Affordable, Fast Storage

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -

Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-4790K MSI Z97 Gaming 7 (Z97 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 4600 8GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Micron M550 (256GB) Samsung SSD 850 EVO (500GB)  OCZ Trion 100 (960GB)  Intel SSD 730 (480GB) OCZ Trion 150 (480GB, 960GB)

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers -

Relevant Software: Windows 8.1 Pro x64 Intel 10.0.26, iRST 13.6.0.1002 DirectX 11 Intel HD 10.18.10.33 Benchmarks Used: IOMeter 1.1.0 RC HD Tune v5.50 ATTO v2.47 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64 PCMark 7 SiSoftware Sandra 2015

IOMeter Testing IO Subsystem Measurements

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

The OCZ Trion 150 series drives slightly outpace the Trion 100 in the 4K random access pattern, but trailed the other drives we tested. With the 8K access pattern, which adds in some sequential transfers, the 960GB Trion 150 fares much better and finishes well ahead of the Trion 100.

 

The overall bandwidth numbers jibe with the IOPs data above--The Trion 150 series pulls ahead of the Trion 100, but trails the other drives.