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.
We sent out some panel pcs with SSDs in them, and so far we have had to replace them all with spinning disks... When is the reliability and write limitation issue going to be solved?
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I trust the name Toshiba. But I can't help but think any company aiming at the budged SSD market will skimp on wear leveling in favor of other attributes. Yes I saw the 7% overprovisioning note, but that was the whole of the attention given to a rather complex topic.
I wouldn't mind the somewhat slower access noted but in recommending an SSD for general system use I would be wary if a drive couldn't handle large volumes of throughput over its lifetime. Modern applications, not even Windows 8, are careful with disk usage. For example Windows 8 is happy to use an average 2% of drive access time for record-keeping alone on my own PC (I had to disable services to make that stop)
The average user is still running 15 junkware applications that tend to be written with any consideration but the user in mind. How much more important is it for them to minimize disk wear for an SSD? Since they're not, the'll need drives that can hack it. I saw numerous benchmarks in the fine article, but not the kind about which I care the most.
So I looked it up myself. Ten minutes of Googling found some information for other OCZ drives, but not this one. The only other thing I can add is this table of return rates for previous editions.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
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I have only had one SSD fail on me, it was an early one. I have switched everything I have at work and at home to SSD (currently mostly Samsung 840/850, Crucial M500/MX100) and have never looked back, modern drives don't seem to have high failure rates and the speed difference is so great I would still use them even if they were unreliable and I had to back them up all the time.
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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.
SSDs aren't designed for being written to - anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
When I read news like this I get excited and think I could buy X to improve my life, only to find out soon thereafter that X is not available where I currently live (Portugal) and when X comes to my place about a year later (if at all), I realize that it costs around twice as much as in the US and additionally requires VAT and delivery fees. :(
Seriously price per gb isn't a barrier. They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier". When there ain't nothin' in your way, that ain't a barrier.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Yep. I did a cursory search on Amazon and found Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD for $97.99, which is 39 cents per GB. This is just another MojoKid advert for his shit site.
The 850 EVO has been gettable for around 32 cents per GB for awhile: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Sam...
Ten machines here. Just one uses an SSD at all, and that only as a temp. drive for editing large audio files.
I simply don't need one for other purposes.
Machines here stay on. Not loading VMs or 60GB games. Apps used stay loaded.
And even on the machine with the SSD, I've only noticed a 3x speed improvement (3 month old Intel 530 series). Worth it to me, because I spend 10 hours a week editing, but otherwise nothing to write home about.
I say SSDs are over-hyped, and I'm an original speed freak, changing the refresh interval on my PC clone to gain, what was it, 2 or 3% performance improvement. Disk optimizing in the PC XT days before anyone else I knew. But SSDs? For the most part, just not that impressed.
I'd rather hear about Chrome finally fixing its "eating all your RAM" issue, because that truly turns your machine into a dog.
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Oh, thought you said white people. My bad.
for the OS. For storage they still need time. I just bought another 4 TB Hitachi Deskstar for my tower because I need the room. I can't wait until the capacity and prices of SSDs match mechanical. I just wish they had something better than a half-truth telling SMART built in.
Of course they did. They haven't made a stable product yet. Anyone who disagrees must not use their computer much. Anyone who moves lots of data around (video editors, Photoshopers, music makers, etc) Knows the OCZ name is absolute shite. I have been building PC's since the 7th grade 80386 FTW. I build custom machines for artists (Video production, DSLR Photography, Sound Studios) and work for a small company that is a 3rd party maintenance company for storage arrays. Toshiba isn't known for it's reliability either, I replace every toshiba drive in the office PC with a Hitachi or Seagate drive off our parts shelf. I bought OCZ Vertex, and OCZ Vector for different clients. They were also used here, and in my home PC. They all failed, and some when they came back "fixed" they still would only work for a week before failing again. This is keeping up with firmware updates. These SSDs are the WORST hands down. I have used brand X drives with more reliability. Now everything is Samsung PRO if the drive is getting used and not just holding mostly static data.
If one of those selections was reliability, don't buy OCZ.
So I can quit seeing the phrase "spinning rust" on Slashdot all the freaking time.
So what good is $0.40/GB if the thing fails in less then year. OCZ has been a price leader for years, also one of the biggest reliability failures. I would not use their stuff if it were free. If you want an SSD with reliability buy a top tier brand like Samsung or Intel. Sandisk is probably decent, but I haven't used theirs.
All HDD and SSD will fail eventually, but OCZ had the worst reputation of all SSD makers. If your data is lost or system crashes do you really care how cheap the drive was?
Everyone who cares about their data should have redundancy. Arguing about quality is stupid and reliability of a single drive if the halflife of the drive is measured in years. Why switch to something that has 50% longer MTBF when you can have two redundant units and get 50000% longer MTBF?
Disks are slow, and SSDs are a small price to pay for fractional random access latency. There is simply no comparison. All computers should run an SSD unless they have specialized requirements that prioritize size and large read/writes -- video perhaps. If the data is valuable, there should be two drives running RAID1 regardless of whether they are SSDs or HDDs.
Toshiba is garbage. Overheating laptops and failing hard drives are the bulk of my experience with their computer products.
SSD cannot displace the nearline functionality of hard disk until it gets within a factor of two in price. BTW, nearline is still expanding exponentially with no end in sight.
Using myself as a predictive example... My workstations all have spinning disks in them, and each has at least one SSD for booting and serious work. The hds are normally spun down, which does wonders for noise and lifetime. The ssds are normally 90% full.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Silicon power SSDs, which my shop has sold over 300 of, have had a failure rate of zero drives thus far, they're medium-high speed compared to other drives, and they're $0.35 per GB. They're still the king in best overall SSD by a long shot.
The OCZ Trion 100 is lagging behind the competition in terms of performance and price, so why such a big deal? See this review by Anandtech (http://anandtech.com/show/9408/ocz-trion-100-240gb-480gb-960gb-review/11).
Since SSD's have been known to have catastrophic failures why not market drives that for all intents and purposes can't fail or can easily be repaired by changing fuses or other simple components? If it's the controller that is failing why not have a second low performance backup controller that only works in read only mode? It just doesn't make sense to me that they can't make these things 100% read only reliable or that bad parts other than the flash can't be relapsed.
Ocz are garbage, wouldnt use their gear if it was given. Theyve had problems with nearly everything theyve made. Utter shit.
How was that a troll?
Real world experience, that goes against the hive mind, is a troll?!
If so, what is the point in commenting on anything?
Either one agrees with the hive, or one should shut up, apparently.
Personally, I am less worried about Slashdot's self-destructive "beta" and more worried about the group non-think. But in saying that, I must be making another troll remark, right?