Micron’s new MLC Enterprise NAND device achieves 30 thousand write cycles – a 6x increase in endurance when compared to standard MLC NAND, according to the company. For enterprise applications that are more performance driven, Micron today also introduced a 34nm SLC Enterprise NAND device that achieves 300 thousand write cycles – a 3x increase in endurance when compared to standard SLC NAND.
These are good news indeed. It was already bad enough that MLC was typically only capable of enduring 10k erase cycles, the most recent Flash memory had dropped that value to half of that: 5k.
Increasing the endurance of MLC Flash to 30k erase cycles will allow for a much increased reliability without the need to resort to expensive SLC Flash, something that has been relegated to drives like the Intel X25-E or the OCZ Vertex-EX. This is also an important enchancement that will allow better chances of 3-bit per cell MLC NAND to be used in SSDs and devices that require more resilience than your typical thumb drive or portable media player.
Micron has a partnership with Intel to produce NAND Flash, so it's likely that this technology will soon make it's way to the highly awarded X25-M drives and others like the cheaper OCZ Agility - which, among other brands, also make use of Intel made NAND chips.
Source: Xbitlabs
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