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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

In my experience with cheap-ish TLC SSDs, once you fill them over 80% you'll occassionally run into random performance issues that manifest in system freezes.

With QLC SSDs, once you get to this level, the freezes are constant - I'd recommend that no one buy a QLC SSD under any circumstances.

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QLC is the new standard and shouldn't matter much for high capacities.

Both depend on running a SLC write cache, once that's full the performance drops significantly, a bit less so on TLC. Consumer ssds just aren't made for writes that cover a large portion of their capacity

Doesn't that feel like theft though? The drive should be advertised as its fully useful capacity, with x Gb of overage - like turbo in a car or on my electric blower. I know I can't use it all the time, but it's there in a pinch. Then people who have specific use cases can oversaturate their drives like they overclock their processors.

SSDs get this cheap exactly by sacrificing excess performance and endurance. You can get some of that back by treating your 2TB drive as a 1.5TB drive. For most people, the tradeoffs chosen by the manufacturer make more sense.

If a regulation like that is passed it would just result in asterisks and small print (* burst write speed 6500MB/sec, if SLC cache is filled due to non-stop bulk writing decreases to 1700MB/sec).

That's already the case today. All speeds are caveated with an "up to".

Not really - I feel like vendors are pushing towards stacking more chips on top of each other rather than stuffing more data into a cell.

QLC feels like a step too far - data retention, TBW lifetime and write speed after running out of SLC cache is horrible compared to TLC, for a 33% increase of capacity.

When SSDs are literally cheap as chips, I'd gladly pay the premium for TLC.

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