In recent years, SSDs has become more and more common in the consumer market, where it would be unimaginable to get risk of the spinning hard disks just a few years ago. SSDs has come a long way from performance, pricing and capacity.
One interesting thought I had was, will SSDs get advanced enough for users to define their performance target. What I mean for performance target is whether the SSD uses SLC, MLC, TLC or QLC flash. It is no secret that many modern SSDs combine a SLC cache for increased burst performance combined with TLC or QLC flash for storage. But one interesting thing is that most SLC cache are emulated through the SSD controller, the SLC cache will change its size in accordance to its remaining free space. So in other words, it is a dynamic cache.
There already exists SSDs that fully use emulated SLC flash from TLC flash from a company called MEMXPRO[1]. So, what I am proposing here is in the simplest form, whether an SSD can have a user control which mode the SSD will operate in. For the simplest use cases is external hard drives. Many people run into problems where sometimes their external drive is just short of capacity to store the data they right now, and other times where time is the constraint they need more speed rather than capacity. Sometimes, the data may be mission critical and the user would not want to have accidental voltage fluctuations in the flash that may corruput the data, so using in SLC mode would be the safest option. What I am interested in is whether the SSD can be toggled into switching modes whether the SSD is in SLC or TLC mode depending on the user’s use case.
It is an interesting thought experiment in my opinion for a storage solution having a dynamic size instead of a fixed size, and potentially give user control based on the user’s needs and concerns. It could be hard to realize due to physical constraints, technology constraint, or maybe just software. But it is something to think about.
