Getting a little TLC from Toshiba
In this brave new world of PCI Express storage, of M.2 drives, U.2 drives and fancy NVMe protocols, is there any space for ye olde 2.5-inch SATA drives and their piffling 6Gb/s of bandwidth and crusty AHCI interfaces?
That this is even in doubt says a lot about how fast storage technology for the PC has changed in recent years. An SSD hooked up via four lanes of PCI Express connectivity has the potential to be as much as five times faster than a SATA drive, in terms of raw throughput. What’s more, that NVMe protocol promises much better random access performance.
On the other hand, even a mediocre SATA SSD will annihilate a conventional magnetic hard drive by pretty much any metric. But here’s the real kicker. Unless your PC is super new, odds are it won’t support M.2, SATA Express or any of that PCI Express newness. Of course, adaptor cards are available. But compatibility can be hit and miss. In other words, if you’re looking for a painless option for upgrading your storage, SATA drives will remain relevant for some time to come.
Enter, therefore, OCZ’s latest, the Trion 100. Tested here in 960GB spec, it’s a big old beast for a solid-state drive in terms of capacity, but such is the plummeting price of flash memory these days, it can be had for under £250. In other words, we’re fast approaching the time when you can have both speed and capacity in a vaguely affordable SSD.
How does OCZ do it? Well, regular readers will recall that Japanese megacorp Toshiba snapped up OCZ whole when the latter got into financial difficulties. This drive is therefore a baby of OCZ’s marriage with Toshiba.
No surprise, then, that is uses Toshiba NAND memory. And not just any old NAND memory, but Toshiba’s latest TLC, or triple-level cell memory. More data bits per cell means more data density and lower cost per gigabyte, of course. It also sports a Toshiba TC58 controller chipset, details on which are basically nonexistent. But the take home here is that this drive’s OCZ-ness probably doesn’t extend much further than branding. OCZ is now Toshiba’s brand for retail SSD.
So, how does it perform? Patchily, if the truth be told. The headline raw bandwidth numbers in the ATTO benchmark look pretty spiffing. Like most SATA SSDs these days, it’s basically bumping into the limitations of the storage interface. But as soon as you step outside of that best-case box, things can get a bit wonky.
In AS SSD’s incompressible sequential tests, for instance, the results for the write test, in particular, were all over the place. We ran it around 15 times and the spread of results was over 200MB/s, with the top-scoring 436MB/s still not being that great and feeling like a one-off. Also up and down were 4K random writes.
Oddly, the Trion’s performance in the PCMark consistency test was less volatile, albeit from a not hugely impressive baseline. But if we had to pick a killer blow, it would be the Trion’s tardy performance in our 30GB file copy test. At nearly four and half minutes, it’s getting on for twice a slow as Samsung’s 850 Pro 2TB model. Yes, that’s a much more expensive drive. But it provides uncomfortable context for the Trion’s real-world performance. – JEREMY LAIRD
SPECIFICATIONS
Interface SATA 6Gb/s
Form factor 2.5-inch
Capacity 960GB
Controller Toshiba TC58
Memory type 19nm TLC NAND
Max IOPS 90,000
Endurance 240TB
Warranty Three years