Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Fifty bucks for a 120GB SSD? OCZ revamps its budget drives

osz trion 150 affordabile solid state drive trion150 image
Toshiba subsidiary OCZ is adding more power to its budget solid state drives, promising this year’s model offer “increased real-world performance” over previous efforts.

The Trion 150, starting at $50 for 120 gigabytes of storage and offering up to 960GB for $270, is the follow-up to OCZ’s Trion 100 line of SSDs. According to the spec page, the drive offers up to 550 megabytes per second read speeds and write speeds of 530MB/s, and up to 90K random write performance and 64K random read performance.

Related Videos

These aren’t high-end numbers, but at a price point this low that’s not surprising. The website for the drive mentions repeatedly that the NAND flash cells are from Toshiba, which is in not unusual. Toshiba is one of the world’s largest producers of flash memory.

The drive comes in four sizes: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB. The performance and reliability varies between models, as seen in the chart below.

 OCZ Trion 150 120GB 240GB 480GB 960GB
Price $50 $70 $140  $270
Max Read 550 MB/s 550 MB/s 550 MB/s 550 MB/s
Max Write 450 MB/s 520 MB/s 530 MB/s 530 MB/s
Max Random Read (4KB, QD32) 79,000 IOPS 90,000 IOPS 90,000 IOPS 90,000 IOPS
Max Random Write (4KB, QD32) 25,000 IOPS 43,000 IOPS 54,000 IOPS 64,000 IOPS
Steady-State Random Write (4KB, QD32) 2,200 IOPS 3,200 IOPS 3,200 IOPS 3,600 IOPS
TBW (Total Bytes Written) Endurance 30 TB 60 TB 120 TB 240 TB
Daily Usage Guidelines 27 GB/day 55 GB/day 110 GB/day 219 GB/day

OCZ has a mixed reputation for reliability, particularly with their discount line. This is something OCZ is hoping to fight with a relatively generous three year warranty. Their web site states USA residents should, in the event of a faulty drive, be able to talk to a representative within 24 hours, and (pending troubleshooting) have a new drive shipped to them within 24 hours of that conversation.

Overall it’s a compelling price point for a decent amount of power, and should look pretty tempting to anyone still using a conventional hard drive in their rig.

Editors' Recommendations

Micron’s new tiny 2TB SSD is bad news for laptop HDDs
An HDD and an SSD lie on a table.

Micron has announced the 2400 SSD, the world’s first 176-layer PCIe Gen4 QLC SSD and the first 2TB 22x30mm SSD.

Micron Technology confirmed it has begun volume shipments of the world's first 176-layer QLC NAND SSD, which utilizes the most advanced NAND architecture. The Micron 2400 SSD will become one of the first products that makes use of the new technology.

Read more
A fix for slow NVMe SSD speeds in Windows 11 is out — here’s how to get it
sandisk internal ssd black friday deal amazon ultra 3d nand

An issue has been plaguing some Windows 11 users where NVMe drives might be running slower than expected, but Microsoft has now acknowledged the problem and issued a fix. As part of the latest Windows 11 monthly preview update, Microsoft is now testing a bug patch that should get rid of the issue.

Initially released on November 22, Microsoft mentions that the KB5007262 (OS Build 22000.348) preview has a fix related to write operations. The company also mentions that Windows 11 was performing unnecessary actions each time a write operation occurs. However, the issue only occurs when the NTFS USN journal is enabled. In most cases, this is always enabled on the C: drive, which is the primary system disk for most NVMe SSDs installed on a PC.

Read more
No regrets: Hisense lets you test drive its TVs for free for 100 days
2021 Hisense U6G 4K TV

Though it's not quite intended as a test drive program, Chinese TV brand Hisense has taken the unusual step of creating a free, 100-day trial period for many of its 2021 4K, 8K, and laser TV models. The move comes after Hisense took a survey of U.S. buyers and discovered, unsurprisingly, that 80% of them want the ability to try a TV at home before committing to a purchase. The program started on September 9 and continues through October 31, 2021. During this time, you'll be able to buy a Hisense U800GR, U8G, U7G, U6G, or L9G TV from a participating retailer and return it for a full refund if you're not happy with it.

We've never seen an offer like this from other 4K UHD TV manufacturers, which suggests that Hisense feels that it needs to overcome some hesitancy among TV buyers. Despite being a huge manufacturer and seller of TVs globally, Hisense is a relatively new brand to the U.S. market, so it doesn't enjoy the same recognition as the companies with longer histories (Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, and LG), or even some of the relatively newer brands (Vizio, TCL).

Read more