Slashdot Mirror
OCZ Toshiba Breaks 40 Cent Per GB Barrier With New Trion 100 Series SSD
MojoKid writes: OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they're also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba TLC NAND Flash memory and a Nanya DDR3 DRAM cache. Details are scarce on the Toshiba TC58 controller but it does support Toshiba's QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Correction — a Toshiba proprietary error correction technology) and the drives have a bit of SLC cache to boost write performance in bursts and increase endurance. The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from a standard hard drive. As such, they're not barn-burners in the benchmarking department, but performance is still good overall and a huge upgrade over any HDD. Pricing is going to be very competitive as well, at under .40 per GiB for capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB and .50 per GiB for the smallest 120GB drive.
First and second gen SSDs were garbage, people are reporting 2 petabyte write lifecycles on them. Samsung just announced 10 year warranties on their consumer models. Intel has been offering 10 year warranties on their enterprise models for a few years now.
That said, if you bought anything other than Samsung prior to about 2013, the "old" OCZ in particular (the "new" OCZ is using the corpse of their brand name for Toshiba manufactured drives now) had failure rates in the 15-20% real world return rate numbers reported by retailers. Failure/return rates for all brands are below 5% for all manufacturers now. There was a dark period from 2011-2013 where a ton of terrible drivers and bad hardware shipped, but they're generally very reliable now. Everyone I know has moved to SSD for their primary drive, and are only using rotational drives for medium length local archival purposes.
moox. for a new generation.
Currently drives that outperform it, like the Samsung 850 Evo, match it on a cents-per-gig level.
This sort of forces one to ask the question, who does Toshiba think it's selling to?
Also, while people are touting Toshiba's "no hassle" warranty, my experience with Toshiba urges me to wait and see how much of a hassle it really is.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This drive is not the first to break the 40 cents/GB mark. OCZ's own ARC series is cheaper than these drives while performing better; Crucial's BX series is roughly the same price while performing much better. Around the 500GB mark, Samsung's 850 EVO is the cheapest and best performer.
The controller has Toshiba's name stamped on it, but is almost certainly a Phison S10. Furthermore the firmware has obvious problems with sustained writes.
Their website says 10 Years or 150TBW for the 256GB model and 10 Years or 300TBW for the 1TB model. TBW is "terabytes written". Which isn't the "2 petabytes to failure" marathon test that took 6 months to complete, but 0.3 petabytes written on a 1TB drive is still a lot and way beyond normal consumer usage. My unofficial opinion is that only about 128gb is "hot" and the rest of the storage on a 1TB drive is typically "cold". Even a professional video editor is going to have trouble topping out their warranty.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/warranty.html
moox. for a new generation.
..."this over there is my browser cache. In a pinch, you may throw out all of this...
The OS has no need to know about wear-leveling. It's fine as a black box. Write data, store it, read it back. That's it. Do it fast and do it reliably. Wear-leveling is NOT about occasionally throwing out valid data. It's about shuffling physical writes around to different sectors, even if the same few files are being written to all the time. The idea is that they all wear out evenly, which extends the life of the entire SSD.
Make the OS/user determine which files are "important" or not? Good lord... you're going to add a huge amount of additional complexity onto an already complex system. It's not worth it. Unless you're in some pathological case (in which case just use a spinning rust disk), it's going to be many, many years before your drive wears out. When it wears out in a decade or two, SMART monitoring will warn you, and you can go buy a new drive that's five times bigger at half the cost.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The 850 EVO has been gettable for around 32 cents per GB for awhile: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Sam...