Know Your SSDs - SLC vs. MLC

[Les]

Yes...I am aware but there is a testing problem with this SSD presently...it will be delayed a bit.

[Crimsonman]

So, where on earth do you get all of these SSDs?

[Les]

I have requested and been requested to test several. As a result, my relationship with companies has grown very close.

[richarddd]

If I have a notebook with the Intel ICH8, will there be a real performance difference between mlc and slc? Will the chip be the bottleneck?

[Les]

No, there should be no deviation from the posted benchmarks for each.

[Cape Consultant]

Les, incidentally, congrats on your much streamlined and improved sig Very nice!

Dave

[Les]

See this thread Cape! Arkit3kt and Graphx Service did a great job!!

Most Impressed with NBR Graphics Team!!!

You should get them to do one up for yourself!

[sor]

This may remain as such because many consumer manufacturers seem to be experiencing a problem simply fitting 128Gb NAND into a 2.5” SATA SSD. Having spoken to several, they seem to agree on the simple fact that, in no time soon, can the slc design reach the average consumer at 128Gb or above, for the most part because it cannot be made at a cost effective price.

I guess Intel disagrees. They're ramping their 200MB/s read 100MB/s write ONFI 2.0 160GB drives this year specifically to make a larger NAND market and get SSDs affordable. I work for the company that makes these chips for them, and they're constantly increasing in density.

Other than that, these are some good basic descriptions of flash.

Edit: I forgot it was EMC who is using our SLC in their drives. I haven't been able to find details about what these will use, just that they're the 8Gbit/16Gbit chips with at least 100,000 write cycles, though one press article said it was MLC. If so, that's good endurance for an MLC.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...te-drives.html

Intel's plan, which CEO Paul Otellini revealed when the margin forecast cut was announced, is to start putting out next-generation solid state disk products for notebooks and enterprise storage in the second quarter of this year. CNET blogger Brook Crothers followed up with Intel on the details and learned that Intel plans to launch a line of 1.8" and 2.5" SSDs at capacities from 80GB to 160GB.

As expected, the new drives will offer much higher speeds than the current generation of SSDs by taking advantage of the Open NAND Flash Interface 2.0. I described in a previous article the coming wave of ONFI 2.0 drives, which will offer 200MBps of sustained read throughput and 100MBps of write throughput and which were planned to enter production in the second half of this year. In light of recent developments, however, it seems that IM Flash, the Intel/Micron joint venture that will make the NAND chips used in the drives, has accelerated its production schedule just a bit.

I suggested in the earlier article that it will be some time before ONFI 2.0 SSDs make their way into portables like the MacBook Air and the Eee PC, because prices will have to drop first. But it looks like the recession's effect on the NAND market's supply and demand curve is taking care of that problem, so these SSDs may show up in portables more quickly than I thought.

[goke313]

OCZ OCZSSD64GB 2.5" 64GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227279

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Just was wondering why the STEC models are already getting 200/100 throughput in their current IOPS drives on FC and SAS interfaces (I think they are still SATA1 only so it would be closer to 135/100) with a max capacity of 256GB. I hadn't even noticed their recent IOPS update until a thread yesterday made me check their current lineup.

Are they doubling the # of chips and allowing full controller access thus doubling throuput while increasing size?

They don't go into great detail, and it's obviously to early to adopt anything like next gen OFNI 2.0 already even at the enterprise level.