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Fusion-io Makes SSDs More Affordable: Page 2 of 3

An MLC chip of a certain capacity can be made on a die that is half as large as a SLC counterpart of similar capacity, so MLC has a significant price advantage. But recently the ratio of SLC prices to MLC prices has widened past the natural 2:1 ratio one would expect.  This is because the volume for MLC has been much larger than for SLC, shrinking the number of SLC suppliers. As a result, the market for SLC has become less competitive and prices have increased to levels as high as six times the prices of their MLC counterparts.

This is a problem for most enterprise SSD makers who contend that only SLC can be used in enterprise SSD applications.  When SLC flash prices spike their SSD prices must keep up.  Fusion-io has been marching to the beat of a different drummer for the past year, now, providing a line of MLC-based drives with specifications that are satisfactory for use in enterprise applications, in addition to their standard line of SLC-based products.

Fusion-io is now tapping into their MLC expertise to go one step further.  SMLC is the company's way of managing MLC chips to provide a drive that matches the endurance and write speed of their SLC offering, but has a slower read speed that matches the performance of their MLC drive.

Since most SSDs provide more read speed than their host systems can accommodate, but are significantly slower when it comes to writes, this trade-off should be very welcome by prospective SSD users, especially since it is being offered at a lower price than are the company's SLC counterparts.

Fusion-io will begin shipping SMLC versions of its ioDrive this quarter.  With SMLC the company is able to create an essentially new "class" of SSD storage.  As in all of its other devices, Fusion-io applies a proprietary blend of techniques in its SMLC ioDrives, such as bad block mapping, Fusion-io's Flashback redundancy and self healing, and error correction coding, to give enterprise-class endurance and reliability, as well.