Compare MLC and TLC

When design­ing SSD dri­ves, the engi­neers were faced with the task of mak­ing a mem­o­ry board small, but roomy and at the same time not too expen­sive. And, of course, to do all this with­in the frame­work of exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. That is why sev­er­al types of SSDs are now pre­sent­ed, but MLC and TLC have become the most com­mon.

Let’s fig­ure out what these stan­dards are and which is bet­ter — MLC or TLC.

How flash memory works and what MLC and TLC mean in general

Any flash dri­ve, includ­ing an SSD, looks in gen­er­al terms as a matrix of cells made of semi­con­duc­tors (main­ly sil­i­con). Each cell, which is a tran­sis­tor, can store a cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion, which is deter­mined accord­ing to the laws of physics. And the more infor­ma­tion is stored in each cell, the high­er the vol­ume of the dri­ve itself.

The first SSDs were made using SLC tech­nol­o­gy. Each cell could store 1 bit of data. That is, 8 tran­sis­tors would be required to write one byte. In addi­tion, SLC dri­ves are very expen­sive to man­u­fac­ture. There­fore, they are prac­ti­cal­ly not used at home. But on servers — quite, which is due to the high­est read-write speeds.

But before buy­ing the fastest SLC SSD, you should think twice. For exam­ple, those devel­oped by HP cost about 300 thou­sand rubles for a 200 GB ver­sion.

For home use, MLC and TLC are suit­able. Of course, they are not so “nim­ble”, but a lap­top or com­put­er does not need to process giga­bits of data per sec­ond.

MLC dri­ves use a three-dimen­sion­al mem­o­ry struc­ture, due to which they can con­tain two bits in one cell. There­fore, they can boast of increased vol­ume.

TLC dri­ves they also use a three-dimen­sion­al struc­ture, they only keep three bits of infor­ma­tion in one tran­sis­tor. The vol­ume of such dri­ves is even larg­er (in the gen­er­al case), and the price is low­er than on the MLC.

MLC or TLC — which is better?

If we com­pare the two types, then it seems that the MLC-vari­ant is supe­ri­or to the com­peti­tor in every­thing:

1. 1. Works faster;

1. 1. Dif­fers in the big oper­a­tional peri­od;

1. 1. Con­sumes less elec­tric­i­ty.

But this is only in the gen­er­al case. Par­tic­u­lars show that TLC-con­fig­u­ra­tion SSDs of some mod­els can be faster, more reli­able and more eco­nom­i­cal than their MLC com­peti­tors. And when con­nect­ed via SATA‑3, the data trans­fer rate is com­plete­ly lim­it­ed by the inter­face band­width.

The main advan­tages of TLC dri­ves It’s less cost and more vol­ume.

There­fore, it is impos­si­ble to say that one type is much bet­ter than anoth­er. Spe­cial cas­es are con­sid­ered. For exam­ple, when buy­ing an m.2 dri­ve with an unlim­it­ed bud­get, it is bet­ter to pur­chase the MLC con­fig­u­ra­tion, since it has more per­for­mance. And if you man­aged to scrape togeth­er only a few thou­sand for a new dri­ve, then you should look towards TLC — for this mon­ey you can buy a solu­tion with a large amount of mem­o­ry.