OCZ announces temptingly affordable Trion SSDs

OCZ, a Toshiba-owned company esteemed for its solid state drive manufacturing, announced today a family of Trion 100-series solid state drives based on the the Toshiba A19 19-nm NAND, according to The Tech Report. As a result of the decision to make use of Toshiba’s controllers in an OCZ-skinned drive, prices should appear lower across the board.

Within the Trion 100 lineup, which ranges from $60 – $370, even the most affordable of the bunch — possessing 120GB of storage space — boasts sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s with write speeds of up to 450MB/s. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 960GB model exhibits sequential read speeds of up to 550MB/s and write speeds of up to 530MB/s. What really distinguishes the more capacious models, however, is the random write performance, which ranges from 25k with the 120GB model to 64k with the 960GB flavor.

While those numbers certainly aren’t state-of-the-art, 60 bucks for a solid state drive is a steal, considering the speed, durability, and silence that gives SSD an edge over traditional hard drives. The pricing puts the Trion 100-series on par with Crucial’s BX100 MLC drive family, which largely targets customers on a budget.

Of course, one advantage consumers might consider in comparing the Crucial drives is this: the Trion 100-series SSDs are compatible with SSD Guru, an OCZ-designed SSD management utility that allows users to “unlock the full potential of their drives,” according to Street Insider. The software facilitates full user administration over drive maintenance as well as tuning, optimization, and monitoring, among other things. Equally exciting is the inclusion of OCZ’s ShieldPlus three-year warranty, which provides an atypically convenient means of replacement, a welcome departure from the usual hassle that often characterizes extended warranties.

“As the market for solid state drives continues to mature,” OCZ CTO Daryl Lang said in a related statement, “the need for high quality yet affordably priced drives has only grown, and we are pleased to be able to provide exactly that with our new TLC-based Trion Series SSDs. To deliver more robust endurance, the Trion has been optimized with extremely tight coupling between the premium Toshiba TLC NAND flash and firmware, making it an ideal solution for value-conscious users seeking an improved computing experience for both desktop and mobile applications.”