facebook rss twitter

Transcend SuperMLC technology trumpeted as SLC alternative

by Mark Tyson on 31 December 2015, 11:31

Tags: Transcend (TPE:2451)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qacxej

Add to My Vault: x

Memory-based computer products specialist Transcend has announced a newly developed SSD storage technology dubbed SuperMLC. The Taiwanese firm claims that this new tech allows its associated SSD products to "break through the performance bottleneck in small capacity SSD to reach 4 times of sequential write than MLC NAND flash and up to 30,000 times of P/E cycles". The first SuperMLC SSD products are scheduled for release in 2016.

According to Transcend, its new technology sits between Single-Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash "by reprogramming the two bits per cell of MLC into one bit per cell to greatly boost its performance and endurance, especially in small capacity SSD". Thus the sequential write speed can be up to four times faster than MLC flash chips and provide up to 30,000 times of P/E cycles, it asserts.

The greater speed and endurance on offer with SuperMLC has a tradeoff: in practice it is halves the capacity of the NAND installed. However Transcend suggests that it is a worthy tradeoff "for industrial enterprises to obtain superior quality that is nearly equivalent to SLC NAND flash at the most cost-effective price". With this industrial enterprise target market in mind Transcend will be aiming SuperMLC products at industrial-grade applications such as; embedded automation computers, engineering machines and so on.

Transcend will be launching a 2.5-inch SSD (SSD510K), mSATA SSD (MSA510), half slim SSD (HSD510) and M.2 SSDs (MTS460 & MTS860) featuring SuperMLC in 2016. Pricing is yet to be announced.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Has a tradeoff in terms of half the capacity? I'd say that's pretty much a real problem there people
That's the difference between SLC and MLC though, always has been - you trade-off speed/endurance and capacity.
Isn't this what others have been doing for the last couple of years as in a write cache.
Yeah just this is a full drive used that way, as I understand it. I'd be interested to know if there are any significant differences at a low level between this psuedo-SLC and actual SLC. It could just be that ‘true’ SLC goes through a different validation process and is lower-volume and therefore maybe more expensive?
I think I would prefer a drive which does this but but then moves the most used long term data onto the other levels of the cell. TLC has better read rates as far as I know.

A bit like an sshd in a way.