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 set a new record for cost per gigabyte – in fact, Crucial’s questionably slow BX200 series still holds that title. Likewise, the Trion 150 series doesn’t set a new bar for affordable SSD performance as it was considerably slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo series in almost every test. On average it was 31% slower when measuring copy performance, 8% slower in our application tests and 32% slower in the PCMark 7 benchmarks compared to the 850 Evo. In other words, despite arriving a year after the 850 Evo, the Trion 150 delivers nothing new, in fact it fails to match what consumers have already had access to for 12 months. This might not be such an issue if the Trion series and the OCZ brand had a strong reputation for reliability. It would be worth spending the same amount of money on a slower SSD if it offered peace of mind that you were investing in a highly reliable product.
If we look at the competing 850 Evo 500GB SSD we find 8272 customer reviews and yet only 3% report serious issues (which seems like a reasonable number for any consumer product). Not to pick on the Trion 100 series, but Newegg’s customer reviews are even more damning. Update: Since publishing the review OCZ has provided us additional information regarding the Trion 100’s reliability issue and we’ve been able to confirm those claims. OCZ says that when the Trion 100 first entered the market it suffered a higher than normal return rate due to a bug in the firmware. This bug was fixed in September 2015 and since then the return rate has dropped dramatically. Finally, OCZ says it 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 result, it comes with OCZ’s ShieldPlus warranty, so we don’t expect a high rate of failure on this drive. OCZ is also very open with return rates and posted the figures on its own website. When it comes to budget TLC SSDs, reliability is everything and this is why I bring the issue up. Of course we can’t say with certainty that the Trion 150 series will suffer the same failure rate, but as I imagine they might say in the business, you’re only as good as your last SSD series. In short, at the same cost per gigabyte as the Samsung SSD 850 Evo series, we see no compelling reason to purchase an OCZ Trion 150 series SSD. It’s our hope that within the coming weeks OCZ are able to reduce the price of the Trion 150 series 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 it an award despite producing similar findings to my own. Am I being too hard on the Trion 150? Let me have it in the comments! Cons: Much slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo, retreads the same ground as existing drives, questionable reliability.
