TripleLevelCell
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Samsung SSD 840 Pro caters to speed seekers with faster random access
It's difficult to thrive in the solid-state drive world. Unless you've got just the right controller and flash memory, most performance-minded PC users will rarely give you a second glance. Samsung muscled its way into that narrow view with the SSD 830 last year; it intends to lock our attention with the new SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. The Pro's 520MB/s and 450MB/s sequential read and write speeds are only modest bumps over the 830, but they don't tell the whole story of just how fast it gets. The upgraded MDX controller boosts the random read access to a nicely rounded 100,000IOPS, and random writes have more than doubled to 78,000IOPS or 90,000IOPS, depending on who you ask and what drive you use. The improved performance in either direction is a useful boost to on-the-ground performance, as both AnandTech and Storage Review will tell you. We're waiting on details of the ordinary triple level cell-based 840 model beyond its 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities, although there won't be an enormous premium for the multi-level cell 840 Pro over existing drives when it arrives in mid-October -- the flagship line should start at $100 for a basic 64GB drive, and peak at $600 for the ultimate 512GB version.
OCZ expects to ship cheap TLC solid state drives in early 2012
It's about time triple-level-cell NAND came to life in consumer products and it looks like OCZ is blazing that trail. The company expects to release its first TLC drive early next year, with a vaunted 30 percent price reduction compared to current MLC drives, which are themselves much cheaper than SLC. The downside is shorter life expectancy, which will be as low as four years, but more durable forms of the technology are due to arrive later in 2012.
Hynix develops triple-level-cell NAND flash: 30 percent cheaper than MLC
The more cells you can pack onto a NAND chip, the cheaper the storage, so we're excited about Hynix's recent announcement of triple-level-cell NAND flash. You might have noticed that MLC-based SSDs are cheaper than SLC units, and TLC keeps the trend alive -- Hynix says the cost of TLC production is some 30 percent lower than current chips. On top of that, the 32GB chips themselves are 30 percent smaller than current NAND chips, meaning device manufacturers will be able to cram more storage into our PMPs and phones. We'll have to wait a little while though: production is going to ramp up in October, and Hynix hasn't committed to using the new chips in SSDs quite yet.
