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back to article OCZ exposes bulging solid disk for 2012

Happy new year: OCZ expects to ship flash drives with a 50 per cent capacity jump next year, starting shipments in January. It's going to ship 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC or TLC) flash, according to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, who was at an OCZ investor presentation last week. TLC flash is inherently slower, less …

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  1. Patrick R
    Holmes

    "would have" a four-year life ?

    Will that be before or after next autumn and "the ability to double flash's working life" ? It makes akes all the difference.

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  2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Re: four-year life

    And does it really mean I will start to lose data on these devices after just a few years of active use?

    How do other storage technologies compare? I mean, hard discs aren't forever but the ordinary Joe doesn't usually fret about the actual lifetime. Is that because the average Joe is naive, or because these are significantly less reliable?

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    1. Ammaross Danan
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      "normal joe"

      "I mean, hard discs aren't forever but the ordinary Joe doesn't usually fret about the actual lifetime."

      Normal Joe still doesn't have to worry about SSD lifetimes. Current MLC drives can take quite the hit. A 120GB SSD with perfect wear leveling (5000 writes per cell), heck, let's drop that to 4000 for "imperfect" wear-leveling, can write 480TB worth of data before having troubles (cells no longer able to be written to). That's 263GB/day for 5 years. 182MB/min of continuous writing. Normal Joe won't do that. If we half that (fair guess TLC will have 2500 write endurance), then it's only 131GB/day. If Normal Joe does more than that in a day, they're not Normal Joe. An Enthusist (or higher) should know better anyway and have a few TB HDDs for their torrents or video processing anyway.

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      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: normal joe

        Thanks! That's the sort of numbers I needed to see.

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  3. MacGuru

    hmm.. hard drives now £££££ and scarce.... SDD sales up..

    handy that HDD are now like golden hens teeth...

    Its almost like a conspiracy..

    I'm still weeping into my keyboard at buying 2TB for £85 each.. £85!!

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    1. Arbuthnot Darjeeling
      Reply Icon

      If it helps

      the first HDD I bought in 1985 cost £100 with the controller installation costing another £100, to put a stunning 10 megabytes on my system.

      It could take every single item of commercially available software for the operating system I was using and leave 4 megabytes free for my novel.

      Mind you, for a few weeks, I felt like I ruled the universe

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  4. Heff

    4 year product life != Mean Failure time

    Frankly a lot of the "new" MLC/TLC drive arrangements coming out simple dont have good sampling data for MFT, or if the drive slowly dies with dwindling usable space or if it grinds along with its ECC doing more and more work and eventually just falls down dead. I dont think they're that trustworthy for enterprise and for home users it _still_ looks like running a little SLC boot drive and traditional platters for your archival/storage stuff too.

    WTB good MFT statistics, but then by the time you could puslish a spread there'd be a new tech generation out there. unfortunate situation.

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