Phison S10: Toshiba MLC And TLC Versus Micron L95B MLC

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Phison offered to let us test its S10 controller with three flash types that will ship in 2015: Toshiba's A19 TLC, 15nm MLC and Micron L95B 16nm MLC.

Mixed Workloads

Our mixed workload testing is described in detail here, and our steady state tests are described here.

In some tests, the 240GB TLC drive performs a little better than some of its competition. I'm not sure if the lower capacity paired with TLC triggered more aggressive garbage collection, which just happened to show itself in the 80% read portion of our script or if some other factor contributed. Companies will get very creative with TLC to increase performance.

The mixed workload random test shows all three TLC drives exhibiting higher performance than the MLC drives. All of the benchmarks discussed so far use 100% entropy (incompressible data). Phison's controller performs better with compressible data, as we've demonstrated.

Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Nuckles_56
    whoa, where did you guys get some 4800GB just for the battery life tests?
    Reply
  • James Mason
    whoa, where did you guys get some 4800GB just for the battery life tests?

    Yeah so many typos I almost thought they actually did get 5 terabyte SSDs somehow.
    Reply
  • Frozen Fractal
    I was arranging a chart while reading this article to see who actually wins. Seems like Toshiba 15nm MLC wins the test, with Micron 16nm MLC close on tail and TLCs wayyyy off :D.

    It is kinda disappointing to see TLCs being outperformed so brutally. I guess increased SLC buffer should mitigate the problem? Samsung already has like this in the EVO 2TB so what do you think Chris?

    Also, does lithography has anything to do with performance? I mean Micron's NANDs are close to Toshiba's MLCs and Micron's cells are just 1nm bigger than Toshiba's MLCs. Can this be co-related somehow?
    Reply
  • WyomingKnott
    It is so cool that they provided these for a head-to-head comparison. Finally, a comparison with all other variables really held even.
    Reply