Most laptop vendors seem to supply relatively cheap MLC drives with their pre-built configurations.
I know that the traditional drill is that a SLC is fast and reliable while a MLC is slower and less reliable; but I've heard that in a last years lots of elaborate algorithms and workarounds made MLC almost as good as SLC. Can anyone show me some definitive modern benchmarks that either prove or dismiss this fact?
Best Answer
All recent consumer drives use MLC flash. Even some enterprise-focused SSDs also use MLC, although with Intel's MLC-HET:
So the extra P/E cycles - and therefore increased longevity of the flash memory - come from picking the highest quality NAND chips, as well as adding a significant spare area of 41%.
As for performance, the MLC Intel 710 is generally slightly slower than its older SLC cousin, the X25-E (but the 710 is far cheaper to compensate). Regardless, SandForce MLC drives usually dominate SSD benchmarks due to real-time compression in the controller, rather than depending upon the intrinsic speed of SLC.