News - OCZ's Agility EX series SSDs promise to bring SLC Flash to the mainstream

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Agility EX SSD makes SLC NAND-based storage truly affordable, says OCZ. Still a bit pricey, though.

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I've never really understood the point of SLC over MLC - if you want the speed gains then it's cheaper to put two MLCs in RAID0 and reliability isn't really an issue.

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Originally Posted by GheeTsar

I've never really understood the point of SLC over MLC - if you want the speed gains then it's cheaper to put two MLCs in RAID0 and reliability isn't really an issue.

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SLC drives are also capable of many more erase cycles than MLC. Typicaly 100k cycles vs 10k cycles.

This is not normally an issue if you are replacing a hard drive for normal desktop OS use because most of the data (OS install files etc) are very rarely changed, so because of the wear leveling, the wear caused by continuously updating a few files gets spread around the whole volume.

This is an issue though if the whole drive is being used for data that going to be continuously updated such as a high performance database server that runs 24/7, or perhaps a big swap volume for some sort of supercomputer.