Innodisk has announced a new technology that should make MLC NAND flash nearly as fast and reliable as SLC NAND. The Taiwanese designer and manufacturer of SSDs calls its technology iSLC which gives the impression that it's a new variant of Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND memory but it's MLC NAND with a twist.
SLC NAND is the most reliable and most expensive type of flash memory. It's mainly used in enterprise level drives due to its costs. Most consumer drives use Multi Level Cell (MLC) or Tripe Level Cell (TLC) NAND. The last two technologies store more bits per cell and due to that it takes longer to read and program each cell. Both technologies are also less reliable than SLC NAND.
Innodisk claims that its iSLC technology offers performance similar to SLC with a price that can be compared to MLC NAND memory. It achieves this using the best possible preselected MLC NAND and using a proprietary flash management algorithm. This reprograms the two bits per cell of MLC into one bit per cell, which increases the sensitivity delta between each level.
This combination enables the NAND Flash to perform similar to a SLC SSD. The company claims that the average endurance of iSLC can surpass 30,000 Program/Erase (P/E) cycles (normal MLC has up to 10,000) , which increases the lifespan of the drive over MLC Flash by a multitude. Additionally, write performance for iSLC is about 70% faster than MLC on SATA II.
