OCZ Trion 100 (240GB, 480GB & 960GB) SSD Review: Bringing Toshiba to the Retail

Performance Consistency

We've been looking at performance consistency since the Intel SSD DC S3700 review in late 2012 and it has become one of the cornerstones of our SSD reviews. Back in the days many SSD vendors were only focusing on high peak performance, which unfortunately came at the cost of sustained performance. In other words, the drives would push high IOPS in certain synthetic scenarios to provide nice marketing numbers, but as soon as you pushed the drive for more than a few minutes you could easily run into hiccups caused by poor performance consistency.

Once we started exploring IO consistency, nearly all SSD manufacturers made a move to improve consistency and for the 2015 suite, I haven't made any significant changes to the methodology we use to test IO consistency. The biggest change is the move from VDBench to Iometer 1.1.0 as the benchmarking software and I've also extended the test from 2000 seconds to a full hour to ensure that all drives hit steady-state during the test.

For better readability, I now provide bar graphs with the first one being an average IOPS of the last 400 seconds and the second graph displaying the standard deviation during the same period. Average IOPS provides a quick look into overall performance, but it can easily hide bad consistency, so looking at standard deviation is necessary for a complete look into consistency.

I'm still providing the same scatter graphs too, of course. However, I decided to dump the logarithmic graphs and go linear-only since logarithmic graphs aren't as accurate and can be hard to interpret for those who aren't familiar with them. I provide two graphs: one that includes the whole duration of the test and another that focuses on the last 400 seconds of the test to get a better scope into steady-state performance.

TLC SSDs in general don't perform well under sustained random workloads and the Trion 100 is no exception. It seems that with TLC SSDs we have to accept a drop from 5K to 2-3K IOPS, which is still fine for basic client workloads since most SSDs from 3-4 years ago couldn't even match that.

The consistency isn't great either, but it's not particularly poor either when compared agains Silicon Motion drives.

Default	OCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBSMI 2256 Reference Design 500GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 250GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB
25% Over-Provisioning	OCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBSMI 2256 Reference Design 500GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 250GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB

Looking at the performance over time, we can see that the baseline performance hovers at about 1,000 IOPS with frequent peaks occuring at 5K to 10K IOPS. That's actually very similar to the Neutron XT's (Phison S10) graph because the baseline is also 1,000 IOPS, although the peaks are higher and more frequent, but it further reassures that the underlying firmware architecture is similar. Increasing over-provisioning doesn't increase the baseline performance, but it does make peak performance moments more frequent and higher (from 10K IOPS to 25K IOPS). 

Default	OCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBSMI 2256 Reference Design 500GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 250GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB
25% Over-Provisioning	OCZ Trion 100 240GBOCZ Trion 100 480GBOCZ Trion 100 960GBSMI 2256 Reference Design 500GBCorsair Neutron XT 480GBCrucial BX100 250GBCrucial BX100 500GBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial MX100 512GBCrucial MX200 250GBCrucial MX200 500GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ ARC 100 240GBOCZ Vector 180 240GBOCZ Vector 180 480GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GBSamsung 850 EVO M.2 500GBSamsung 850 EVO mSATA 1TBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung SSD 850 Pro 512GBSanDisk Extreme Pro 480GBSanDisk Ultra II 240GB