Every SSD manufacturer with a close relationship to Toshiba is ready to jump aboard the TLC train. Plextor plans to release its flagship M7e PCIe-based m.2 SSD between September and August with MLC, just in time to feed reviewers at the Flash Memory Summit. Not far behind the M7e launch will be the value product from the 7 Series, M7V.
M7V will ship with Toshiba TLC NAND flash, but we still don't know if it will come from current A19 (19nm) or upcoming 15nm stock. This will be Plextor's first retail product to ship with TLC flash.
Over the last few days we've talked quite a bit about TLC flash and the challenges ahead for SSD makers and consumers. Cache, be it from an SLC layer or DRAM, gives users a buffer area before seeing true TLC sequential write performance and also increases endurance.
Along with the new 7 series products from Plextor comes the third iteration of PlexTurbo. Dubbed PlexTurbo 3.0, the software can use up to 50 percent of your system's DRAM to cache data written to the drive. It seems like a large amount and it is, but PlexTurbo 3.0 now gives users the option to select the density of the cache and the release time of the data held in the DRAM.
Of the DRAM cache schemes we've seen to date, this appears to be the best so far for next generation low cost TLC SSDs.
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
