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Four-Corner Performance Testing
Comparison Products
Nearly all of the drives on this chart utilize TLC flash with write enhancement technology (an emulated SLC cache) to deliver burst speeds that are not sustainable for more than a few seconds. Samsung's 850 EVO is the current mid-range performance leader. Its quad-plane TLC is the exception to our rule, delivering burst writes for longer than SSDs with TLC flash from either Toshiba or Micron.
To read about our storage tests in-depth, please check out How We Test HDDs And SSDs. Four-corner testing is covered on page six of our How We Test guide.
Sequential Read
Every company with a SATA 6Gb/s drive says its sequential read performance lands between 540 MB/s and 560 MB/s. Given the power of today's controller's it's easy to hit the interface's ceiling using this workload. Drives are still differentiated at low queue depths, though.
The Trion 150 makes quick work of its predecessor, beating it by more than 40 MB/s at a queue depth of two. OCZ's 960GB model is on the chart as well, but we're really only talking about the 512GB-class drives.
Sequential Write
Updated firmware more than doubles the sequential write performance at a queue depth of two compared to the original Trion. OCZ now has a TLC-based SSD that competes readily in the value-oriented space. In fact, it comes close to beating Mushkin's 512GB Reactor, which utilizes MLC flash.
You can also see that the Trion 150 smooths out some of the variance between when the emulated SLC buffer kicks in and TLC's native write behavior.
Random Read
The Trion 150's random read performance is only marginally better than its predecessor. Adata's SP550 still outperforms the 480GB Trion at a queue depth of one. And none of the other drives in our chart, including the 960GB Trion 150, can match Samsung's 850 EVO at low queue depths.
Random Write
All of the TLC-based drives except for Samsung's 850 EVO suffer low random write performance.
Toshiba, Micron and SK hynix all fall behind Samsung when it comes to vertical NAND stacks with quad-plane access. Toshiba didn't like something about its first 3D flash, which the company calls BiCS. BiCS 2 is already under development, but is still not ready for SSDs. OCZ needs that next-gen technology to compete more aggressively against Samsung in the high and low ends of the market.
