Looking for an affordable SSD for your personal machine? Don’t care about speed? Check out the OCZ Trion 100. Although it’s one of the slowest SSDs available on the market today, it is still faster than a plain old hard drive, and will last you years to come.

Just how much storage does your money get you? Pick up anywhere from 120GB to 980GB for $57 -- $370, respectively. That means this SSD is poised to be the most affordable option on the market. If you need to improve the performance of an old, worn-out system, this SSD will do the trick. It is not built for corporate environments, or any environment that must be secured -- it does not support encryption.

Design

Similar in design to the OCZ ARC 100, the Trion 100 is built to save you money. The reason it is even more affordable than the ARC 100 lies in the fact the ARC uses a controller built by OCZ, while the Trion relies on Toshiba components -- not just the controller, but the flash memory and others as well. The reason, which you may already know: Toshiba acquired OCZ a year ago, and this drive is the first thing the company has released since then.

This OCZ SSD is the first to be built with triple-layer-call (TLC) flash memory, which means it is a higher density than other drives. It also means it performs slower than others, since more memory cells are able to be placed in the same area of the silicon wafer. Besides this difference, it is designed like all other 2.5-inch SSDs. It is 7mm thick, so it will also work in certain ultrabooks along with desktops and laptops.

When you open the box, you’ll note that it doesn’t come with any accessories at all, like a drive bay bracket. No worries -- this allows it to be more easily installed into a desktop drive bay, and it doesn’t need to be secured into place as it has no moving parts whatsoever.

Performance

It supports the latest SATA3, as well as all other SATA revisions. Its best use is as the main drive of a computer that hosts the OS and applications, but can work with all applications where a single standard hard drive is relied upon.

As previously mentioned, the Trion 100 has a high endurance level. As you may know, there is a limited amount of data that can be written to the drive before reliability suffers. Endurance is measured by the number of program-erase cycles that can be performed before you can’t write to the drive any longer.

According to OCZ, the 120GB Trion has the endurance rating of 30TB, the 240GB Trion 60TB, the 480GB capacity 230TB, and 980GB capacity 240TB. This is great for the average user -- if you perform tasks that involve a lot of writing to the drive, you might want to choose the highest capacity, or another model altogether.
Pricing

As mentioned in the beginning of this review, the Trion is the most affordable option out there in regards to a SSD. It may be slow in comparison to other SSDs on the market, but it is much faster than most hard drives, making it perfect to revamp an old system. That is, if you don’t need to worry about encryption support.