During its financial call for the third quarter of financial 2015 year, Micron also shed some details regarding its future solid-state drive plans, including the fact that it expects that over 50 percent SSDs to be based on TLC NAND in 2016.

Micron has been quite cautions in using triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND flash in its solid state drives but it now appears that most kinks and challenges have been sorted out as the company expects half of its SSDs to be based on TLC NAND next year.

“We will release our own consumer SSD based on TLC NAND technology in the second half of 2015,” said Mark Adams, president of Micron. “We expect to have roughly 50% of our SDDs on TLC by the end of fiscal year 2016.”

The TLC NAND is 20 to 25 percent cheaper than MLC NAND but it is also considered less durable and reliable as current MLC NAND can sustain 3000 program-erase cycles, TLC is limited to around 1000 program-erase cycles. The TLC NAND is also slower compared to MLC NAND, at least for now.

According to the report from Kitguru.net, Micron, which usually uses Marvell controllers with its own firmware, have managed to reach desired levels of both reliability and performance with TLC SSDs and should soon announce its first consumer TLC NAND SSD.

Currently, Samsung leads the TLC-based SSD market but it appears that this market will get crowded pretty soon.



Source: Kitguru.net.