Budget drives by circumstance only
Even if you have no plans whatsoever of overhauling your setup and upgrading to a fancy pants NVMe-based solid state drive, you should be super excited about the category. Why? Simply put, those stupid-fast drives that take advantage of PCI Express are pushing yesterdays performance models into budget territory. Just look at Toshibas new OCZ Trion 150 line for evidence of this.
The Trion 150 line is pitched as a real-world performance upgrade to the Trion 100 family. You might recall that we evaluated a 480GB Trion 100 SSD and werent exactly blown away, but if the Trion 150 does indeed improve real-world speeds like Toshiba claims, it would suddenly become much more compelling.
Lets cover some stats. The Trion 150 uses Toshibas 15nm triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory paired with Toshibas own controller and firmware. The result is a list of performance ratings that, not too long ago, would have been considered top-end. Heres a look at capacities and speed ratings:
And heres a look at street pricing:
- OCZ Trion 150 120GB: $46 (~$0.38 per GB)
- OCZ Trion 150 240GB: $70 (~$0.29 per GB)
- OCZ Trion 150 480GB: $140 (~$0.29 per GB)
- OCZ Trion 150 960GB: $270 (~$0.28 per GB)
Those prices are a bit cheaper than the what the Trion 100 series debuted at—the aforementioned Trion 100 480GB that we reviewed was $159 versus $140 for the same capacity Trion 150.
Once again, Toshibas hoping to entice "value oriented mainstream consumers" with these new drives, and at the above price points, the company has our attention. The question is, do these drives bring enough of a real-world performance bump to make them more exciting than their predecessors? Well let you know as soon as we have a chance to run some benchmarks.
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