[jsheard]

Even datacenter-grade drives scarcely use SLC or MLC anymore since TLC has matured to the point of being more than good enough even in most server workloads, what possible need would 99% of consumers have for SLC/MLC nowadays?

If you really want a modern SLC drive there's the Kioxia FL6, which has a whopping 350,400 TB of write endurance in the 3TB variant, but it'll cost you $4320. Alternatively you can get 4TB of TLC for $300 and take your chances with "only" 2400 TB endurance.

[ComputerGuru]

Current tech meets the needs of normie home users (most of whom will never see even a full drive write) and big enterprise (servers have specific retirement schedules, each and every server is fully disposable, complete redundancies abound) but leave out in the cold those of us running small businesses and smaller data centers where machines are overprovisioned and not on a depreciation schedule, hopefully with a RAID 1(0) or ZFS/LVM being the safety mechanism in place.

[LoganDark]

I got 4TB of TLC for $230 (Silicon Power UD90). It even has SLC caching (can use parts of the flash in SLC mode for short periods of time).

[jsheard]

True, I was looking at the prices for higher end drives with on-board DRAM, but DRAM-less drives like that UD90 are also fine in the age of NVMe. Going DRAM-less was a significant compromise on SATA SSDs, but NVMe allows the drive to borrow a small chunk of system RAM over PCIe DMA, and in practice that works well enough.

(Caveat: that DMA trick doesn't work if you put the drive in a USB enclosure, so if that's your use-case you should ideally still look for a drive with its own DRAM)

[drtgh]

TLC cannot mature as long as it continues to use 3D-NAND without utilizing a more advanced material science. Reading data and preserving data consume writes, what degrades the memory, because the traces in the vertical stack of the circuit create interference.

Perhaps there are techniques available to separate the traces, but this would ultimately increase the surface area? which seems to be something they are trying to avoid.

You should not use datacenter SSD disks as a reference, as they typically do not last more than two years and a half. It appears to be a profitable opportunity for the SSD manufacturer, and increasing longevity does not seem to be a priority.

To be more specific, we are talking about planned obsolescence for consumer and enterprise SSD disks.

> If you really want a modern SLC drive there's the Kioxia FL6, which has a whopping 350,400 TB of write endurance in the 3TB variant, but it'll cost you $4320.

Did you read the OP article?