TLC NAND is coming

Discussing TLC and write amplification

How about this thought: "50 full writes/cycles per day for 5 years does not necessarily translate to 89,000 P/E cycles. Please place close attention to the user/flash capacity ratio difference between this drive and the regular Optimis and Ultra. You will see that this ratio is reduced while the number of writes/day increases. This is because the WA is reduced as over-provisioning increases. I calculated the WA for the regular Optimus drive to be 2.58, while Ultra is 1.38 and Ultra+ is 1.03. Over-provisioning ((flash capacity-user capacity)/user capacity) is 28%, 71%, and 156%, respectively. The endurance required in all cases is about 37k cycles. User capacities start at 200GB, 150GB, and 100GB, for Optimis, Ultra and Ultra+, respectively."

Cacheing?

Wouldn't it be better to combine SLC and TLC? Write data to SLC first and then have the controller move it to TLC once the data has stayed unchanged for a sensible length of time. Unlike RAM cacheing, no loss if the power suddenly vanishes, no big(gish) backup battery needed to prevent that.

Would it be possible to bake a combined SLC + TLC chip or are the processes different?

SLC & TLC on the same chip?

Each block in a NAND Flash die can be formatted as either SLC or TLC. The SLC blocks are used for the important stuff like firmware storage and FATs. The TLC-formatted blocks are then used for general user file storage.