OCZ Plans On Offering Low Cost TLC Solid State Drives Just In Time For The HDD Shorta

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Just when all seems bleak on the storage front, a possible savior has emerged: OCZ. No, the company doesn’t have plans to open an HDD facility in a dry location and start pumping out traditional drives. Instead, the solid-state-focused OCZ plans on rolling out a new, cheaper type of SSD early in 2012, in exactly the same time period that experts think traditional HDD reserves will be drying up.

OCZ told attendees of the Needham 5th Annual HDD & Memory Conference that the company plans on shipping triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND SSD drives in the first quarter of next year, Storage Review reports. That would make it the first TLC-based SSD product to hit the streets. Current SSDs use multi-level-cell (MLC) NAND. There are pluses and minuses to TLC NAND as it exists currently; it is approximately 30 percent cheaper than MLC NAND – which could make it an attractive alternative during the upcoming HDD dry spell – but current TLC SSDs could have shelf lives as low as four years, making it a temporary Band-aid at best. OCZ hopes to offset that negative down the line with the second generation of its SSD-life-enhancing Indilinx nDurance technology, which is expected to become available fall of next year.

Image credit: StorageReview.com



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