OCZ Plans inexpensive SSDs

[Anakha56]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/di ... Flash.html

OCZ Plans Inexpensive SSDs Based on Triple-Bit-Per-Cell NAND Flash.

OCZ Intends to Massively Drop SSD Prices Next Year

OCZ Technology, a major own-brand vendor of solid-state drives, said that triple-cell-per-bit (TLC) NAND flash memory could be used for solid-state drives. In fact, the company plans to use the memory originally intended for temporary storage solutions (e.g. memory cards and USB flash sticks) for permanent storage devices, e.g., SSDs.

"We announce [the intention to ship] TLC-based drives! [...] People have been talking about [TLC-based SSDs] for a long time and we have now put ourselves with next-gen [Indilinx Everest] controller, which we are shipping in January, and position it for low-end servers, consumers, laptops, retail; those sub-segments that really can adopt TLC-based solutions. This is really where we can get over four years of life [of SSDs]," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ at the Needham HDD and memory conference.

Triple-bit-per-cell (3bpc) NAND flash is relatively cheap in manufacturing, but its redundancy is dramatically below that of multi-layer cell [MLC, 2bpc]: around a 1000 writes (for TLC) versus 10000 writes (for MLC) and simply cannot be compared to the number of write cycles for SLC [single layer per bit] which are around 100 000.

The latest OCZ Everest controller for SSDs does support TLC NAND flash. In theory a combination of a very advanced controller along with extreme redundancy are needed to overcome disadvantages of TLC type of memory. What OCZ plans to do remains unknown.

[StarBound]

Won't TLC cut down the life of the drive to nearly a year then? Or will it be 10 years? Don't remember but isnt the life expectancy of Intel SSDs 1,000,000 hours? ~ 114 years?

[KALSTER]

Like the last paragraph suggests, the life of TLC drives can be extended by employing extreme redundancy and with an advanced controller. If a normal TLC drive would last 1 year say, then using redundancy to extend it's life to 10 years would mean using 10 times as much storage for the same amount of usable storage. A drive would be 128GB, but to last 10 years, it would be sold as a 12.8GB drive, or something like that. TLC flash memory would need to be a lot cheaper than the current standards to make this viable, if I have it correct.

[hamin_aus]

Their Vertex II drives are still around and are significantly cheaper than the newer vertex III drives.

Nothing wrong with them either. Just buy one of these if you want a (relatively) cheap OCZ drive

[StarBound]

The 64gb Vertex 3 drive is around R1300. For a windows boot and office drive your getting the fastest possible speed. The question I would like to pose there is my intel x25-m has a read speed of 280mb/s and the vertex 3 a read of 550mb/s. Would that cut the boot time from 6 seconds to 3 seconds or is that too fast for the cpu to process?

[Sojourn]

define inexpensive.

[StarBound]

define inexpensive.

Same price per GB that harddrives currently have?

[RuadRauFlessa]

define inexpensive.

Same price per GB that harddrives currently have?

Nope that is still expensive as you have a write limit on an SSD whereas on a normal HDD you don't. Say these new drives sell for R1000 each for a 1Gb drive... (I know I know it is just an example)... then you have 1000 writes theoretical writes for every GB. That is one write for every Gb per Rand you spend on the drive. So theoretically if you have written 1Gb 1000 times onto the drive then the drive is gone. Kaput. Finished. Dead as a doorknob.

If you use it as swap space then that drive will give way really quickly depending on what type of applications you are using. You could even possibly see a drop in capacity after the first use as swap space on Windows. If you use it as a startup drive it would be a lot less traffic on the drive but you will still have a limited amount of startups before it tells you to go fly a kite.

So in retrospect the 10MB HDD I got with an 8086 back in the day was still a better investment because it still has it's 10MB capacity. And if I whip it up at the moment it will still have the data on it it had about 15 years ago when last it was fired up.

[StarBound]

Let's figure out how many writes a drive does in a day then? As I said if my drive lasts me 10 years then I am entirely fine with it simply because the movement of technology means I will be replacing for more space and faster read write speeds. But currently if the max write is 10k times with MLC you make it sound like my drive will be redundant in about 3 years with the way windows does things. Especially considering patches and updates.