Friday, February 18, 2011

OCZ move 25nm NAND flash, customers are not happy

OCZ Technology announced today that it is the first manufacturer of solid state drives to complete the transition to solutions of NAND flash-based storage of 2Xnm. In particular, the company is using 25nm NAND flash chips to Micron, occupying less space and allows (possibly) great current capacity SSDs more 34nm chip, while also cost about 10-15% less.

The smallest chip began to appear in the vertex 2 and agility 2 drives last week, but so far there has been no significant price cuts from retailers who know neither OCZ is making a clear distinction between 25nm and 34nm SSDs. What some unsuspecting buyers indicated, however, is that the usable capacity on the newer units actually fell.

Storage reviews explains the reason behind this in a recent article and basically all comes down to the duration of the chip 25nm. You see, 25nm NAND is "good" for 3000 cycles of writing, while the old 34nm NAND reaches 5,000 cycles, so as to take account of this decline of OCZ needs to increase the amount of spare capacity which replaces the worn sections as a unit of living single cell degrades. As a result, newer units are always around 4-5 GB of usable storage space than the models themselves with 34nm--which is pretty critical when you are getting a bootable disc 40 GB in less.

In addition to the reduction of usable storage space, the problem would get even more frustrating for customers looking for a RAID 0, 1 or 5 installation only to discover that have units with capacity mismatch.

We note that this question is not exclusive to OCZ and how other top manufacturers releasing 2Xnm unit we will see probably a similar drop of usable storage space to allow guarantees and expected life spans remain the same. However, there is something to be said about the lack of transparency when it comes to usable capacity and failure of OCZ to label clearly what version you are buying--after all, customers are becoming less and less space for the same price and performance, while OCZ networks presumably higher profits with the reduced cost of small 25nm flash.

We hope that OCZ takes the major problem with this, but so far the only solution offered is for buyers of disgruntled send back their 25nm unit and receive a credit towards the more expensive 32 Gb die-based units. " Read the full article here.



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