A Closer Look
All nine of the drives we're testing use Phison's PS3110-S10 controller and Nanya DRAM. The DRAM buffer is the same size at each capacity point, but grows as you step up through the drives equipped with more NAND. After all, larger SSDs require more DRAM to cache the page table map.
The most interesting flash we're testing is Toshiba's A19 TLC. OCZ recently released its Trion 100 family with this stuff, but that's the only retail product so far with it. All of the A19 TLC flash we've seen so far has been in TSOP packages (the silver connection points on the side of the package).
The three A19 TLC drives use 16 NAND flash packages to increase parallelism. The six MLC drives use just eight packages.
The Toshiba 15nm MLC is in BGA packages, with eight on each PCB. Toshiba 15nm MLC is still very rare. At this time, no retail products use this flash, though we expect it to ship in a number of SSDs before the end of the year. This is the most advanced 2D NAND flash process available, allowing Flash Forward (Toshiba and SanDisk's joint venture) to pack more dies per wafer than any other.
Micron's L95B (16nm MLC) is in a number of products. Crucial's MX100 was one of the first SSDs to use it.
At Computex 2015, Micron announced 16nm TLC flash, but we don't think it will appear in retail products until early 2016. Micron's 16nm TLC retains the same 128Gb density per die, though the die is 28% smaller than L95B.
