THE era of cheap extra-dense 64-layer 3D flash storage could be upon us all in the near future. This is good news especially since the trend these days is for consumers to move more into non-mechanical drives. If you check current laptop specs, the rave is all about SSDs. The same thing for desktop systems. System drives are, more and more, relegated to SSDs for faster boot times and the regular mechanical hard drives contain mostly data that applications use.
Intel’s launching of "the world’s first commercially available 64-layer, TLC, 3D NAND solid state drive (SSD)” is the step toward this direction.
Please welcome, the Intel SSD 545s. It’s available now on Newegg for USD$179.99 for the 512GB capacity. Sure, there are a whole lot more options for the same price point but those aren’t the new 63-layer 3D flash storage kind.
I couldn’t even begin to explain how excited I am for this. I’m not much of a speed freak when it comes to data access in my data drives. Reliability and capacity come first before speed. Besides, having and using an SSD is so much faster than having a mechanical drive that maxes out at 7,200rpm for most consumers.
Considering that more memory space can be had in lesser number of chips, theoretically, that can mean that larger capacity drives can be made available for a cheaper price point. That’s the other exciting part of this, if you ask me. This could ultimately mean that you and I can have a 2TB SSD for less than or at the same price as a 1TB SSD right now. Or, computer gods permitting, that 2TB SSD be priced at the same level as a 512GB drive right now. Oh my!
For now, it’s a wait and see. If you’re interested with a thorough review, I recommend reading the Tom’s Hardware review.