MLC

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the HyperX 3K SSD, a high-performance, lower priced solid-state drive enabling users to experience ultra-responsive gaming, multitasking and multimedia computing power. Powered by the second-generation SandForce SF-2281 processor and based on SATA Rev. 3.0 (6 Gb/s) interface, Kingston HyperX 3K SSD is the ideal high-performance upgrade solution for budget-minded gamers, enthusiasts, multitaskers, overclockers and system builders.

There is no doubt that Intel’s mainstream family SSD drive scheduled to come in Q1 2013 will cost an arm or leg, especially in its top 1.6TB version. We are talking about 2.5 inch SATA 6Gb/s drive that is currently codenamed as Wolfsville.

We don’t know much about it but we do know that it’s based on 20nm MLC chips and that it comes in Q1 2013. The new drive should end up branded as 500 series starts at modest 60GB and it looks like it should replace the 520 series.

Storage specialist SanDisk is to take to the stage at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) to present what it claims is the future of flash storage: a three-bits-per-cell chip capable of squeezing 128Gb into 170 square millimetres.

Like Intel and Micron's joint announcement late last year of a 128Gb flash memory chip, SanDisk is boasting of increase capacities. Where its competitor is using a 20nm process size, however, SanDisk has shrunk down even further to 19nm.

A graduate student speaking at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies this week, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors. This is something we've known about for some time, but it appears that that many did not. Researchers tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors and they found that program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency.