What Happens When Flash Moves to Triple Level Cell (TLC)

Solid State storage promises to transform the capabilities and economics of the performance and increasingly the mainstream segment of enterprise storage, and a myriad of different vendor implementations of solid state have arrived on the scene. The main difference between these new systems and traditional storage arrays is one thing: the storage medium. One of its defining characeristics is that it changes – a lot. The pending introduction of a new architecture for flash called triple level cell (TLC) will double the capacity per area for storing data; what what will be the impact on data integrity and resiliency? How are these new cells different from the previous and what should you, as an enterprise storage buyer, know about them?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this presentation, you will have a basic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the TLC architecture, what it is and what motivated its development.
You will understand how the TLC architecture is likely to impact the use and deployment of flash memory in enterprise applications by examining the effects of the cell on resiliency and data integrity.
Finally, we will look at some of the other upcoming non-volatile storage architectures that are leading research in semiconductors and how they might compete with TLC.