OCZ Trion 150 Budget SSD On Linux

The Trion 150 has been generating a fair amount of buzz since its release back in January as being a nice budget solid-state drive ideal for first-time SSD buyers. The Trion 150 is a true budget SSD with the 480GB SATA 3.0 drive retailing for just $140 USD, or about 30 cents per GB. Tests and results of the OCZ Trion 150 under Windows have been rather favorable so I figured it would be interesting to test out this drive under Ubuntu Linux.

The OCZ Trion 150 SSD uses 15nm TLC NAND flash memory from Toshiba and the drives are rated for 550MB/s maximum read speeds, 450~530MB/s maximum write speeds (depending upon model), 79~90k IOPS maximum random reads (depending upon model), a TBW endurance of 30~240TB, and a MTBF of 1.5 million hours. This 2.5-inch SATA drive is available in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities. The 120GB version retails for $45 USD, 240GB for $69, 480GB for $139, and 960GB for $269. What a bargain, particularly for the higher-end models.

OCZ promotes the Trion 150 series as being fast and efficient, performance made affordable, world-class quality and reliability, and offering "serious speed." These new SSDs are backed by OCZ's three-year ShieldPlus warranty.

As I had picked up the Trion 150 for a test system rather than being a free review sample, I had bought the Trion 150 120GB model, which set me back just about $50 USD at Amazon.com and puts it in line with other SSDs of a similar capacity.

To no surprise at all, the OCZ Trion 150 120GB was detected immediately under Linux and working fine, complete with TRIM. The initial tests were done from an Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 installation with the Linux 4.2 kernel. EXT4 was used as the file-system during this SSD testing. For getting an idea for the performance of the Trion 150, I compared it to a few other 120GB SSDs I had available at the time of testing: Intel 530 Series, Intel 535 Series, SanDisk SDSSDA12, and the Samsung EVO 850.