Slides from the Chinese startup Huaji have been leaked to us that promise a 4TB PCIe SSD for $149. To achieve the low cost SSDs the company has purchased old equipment used to produce NAND at 2x nm. The company was founded in 2011 by several NAND veterans and graduates from the Beijing Tech University. The drive was for a short time available on Amazon but quickly pulled after we ordered it.
Flash NAND with cell-sizes 20 to 27nm were common around 2010-2012. The company is using new technology to get higher yields resulting in cheaper production of the chips. The slides show a new technology developed by Huaji called Traffic Smoothing. 
This technology ensures that electrons are able to pass the floating gate more reliable, even when chips are not as perfect as normally required for NAND flash. Huaji has also developed its own controller that adds an additional FxL error correction layer.
Initially Huaji planned to release a 6.4TB drive but during first tests there were issues allocating more than 4TB.
Huaji targets mass storage with these drives. The slides show sustained speeds of around 400MB/s which is current below SATA performance. Nevertheless the company has chosen for a PCIe interface. According to our source because of availability, cost and because speed improvements might come through a firmware update. This is possible by optimizing the Traffic Smoothing and FxL algorithms.
The above image shows some of the controller chips that have been added to work with the specially prepared Huaji MLC NAND. The image shows that also NAND from Samsung, SK Hynix and Toshiba could be used in 'compatibility mode'. This would be a mode where the controller works like a regular one without the proprietary Huaji algorithms enabled. In this mode the controller works likely any other high performance SSD controller. The company likely seeks partners with larger production capacities to use their controller in 'compatibility mode' in order to secure further investments in their technology.
The ideas behind the technology were first tested in 2011 after which the company developed its first successful prototype in 2014. The source that leaked these slides told us that 4TB Huaji drives should become available in June this year at all major retailers.
Note: We actually briefly found the drives on Amazon proving their existence, soon after we made a purchase, the order was cancelled and the product page was pulled.
Update: As our witty readers already found out, it was our attempt on April Fools. Huaji is Simplified Chinese for funny and the model no of the SSD spelt fools in reverse.
