More TLC NAND Trouble

[SteelCrysis]

http://techreport.com/news/28607/ocz-tri...e-capacity
People are already catching on that TLC NAND is crap.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9408/ocz-t...-review/11

The downside of being the slowest modern drive we have tested is that OCZ can only compete in price, but unfortunately the pricing isn't aggressive enough for the Trion to be competitive at all. Currently the ARC 100 is even cheaper than the Trion 100, which just doesn't make any sense because even OCZ is positioning the ARC 100 higher on paper and it's undoubtedly a better drive all way around. There is usually some level of decline from the initial street price soon after the launch, but in all honesty OCZ needs to cut the prices by 15-20% for the Trion to have a place on the market. OCZ told us that it will be running promotions with discounts, but it remains to be seen if those can bring the prices down to a level where performance and price meet. It has the lowest performance, thus it needs to be priced lower than the competition to provide the value to the user because right now I wouldn't have to think twice about buying the BX100 or 850 EVO over the Trion 100.

All in all, getting TLC done right is far from an easy job as we have witnessed with here. I believe that with the first big wave of TLC SSDs coming this year we are going to see sub-par performance compared to MLC drives. Fundamentally I have no problem with that because even a "slow" modern TLC SSD is a significant upgrade from a hard drive, but it is time for the manufacturers to realize that the price should reflect performance. It's just silly to take up to 50% hit in performance and only offer a few dollar savings because any educated buyer will gladly pay the extra few dollars for a substantially better drive. Once other NAND vendors start to ship 3D NAND in volume next year, we will likely see the majority of client SSDs move to TLC because as Samsung showed with the 850 EVO, 3D TLC NAND can enable planar MLC-like performance, but in the meantime it seems like MLC SSDs will still provide better overall value.