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Apple SSD Supplier Hit With Contamination Disaster, Flash Storage Prices Expected to Spike
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Thanks.
Regarding (2), at one point in time *everyone* used MLC (and SLC before that) as it was the only show in town. This got supplanted by cheaper-to-produce TLC and latterly QLC, and some of the differences were made up for with better controllers & firmware.
Things don't always necessarily get better for the consumer; sometimes, companies cut costs in order to increase profits. This would also be an possible explanation for what you observe in (3).
The reason I'm interested in your claim is because afaik almost no consumer-grade SSDs use MLC nowadays (even Samsung's latest 'Pro' consumer ssds are TLC). And when it does show up in the enterprise market, it's extremely expensive. Given that, imo it is very unlikely that Apple are using MLC in any of their current SSDs. I think they just charge what they think their market will bear for what are standard TLC SSD upgrades.
Some angry truckers drove through the clean room.
I thought SLC cache was used in higher grade SSDs to keep the transfer speeds up where the full device wasn't fully SLC - the most common kinds of SSD for bang-for-buck purposes appear to be TLC with SLC cache. Even the Samsung 980 Pro appears to have used TLC with SLC cache to save costs rather than use MLC.
In the Mac Pro they made be connected via high bandwidth (potentially RAID?) connections.
Apple will be one of the biggest consumers of SSD and will have agreed prices far in advance so they might not immediately feel the impact of any shortage - just like the general CPU chip shortage I guess.
But medium term prices increases might be possible.
I'd like to know this as well. These companies have been caught doing price fixing and collusion in the past so I wouldn't put it past them here. To use this loss of supply as a way to push up prices...
nonsense, they are a publicly traded company and this has impact on their earnings, so they are upfront about it ...
The 'SLC cache' you're describing in many current TLC SSDs isn't actually made from SLC NAND, but is just a portion of TLC NAND that temporarily is set to store just 1 bit per location rather than the usual 4 bits. In this way the controller dynamically trades a small amount of capacity for ingestion speed. But it's 'virtual SLC' rather than actual hardware SLC NAND.
I'm not aware of any manufactureres who are still making real SLC Nand, though there might be some special use exotica out there.
The 4th module is clearly not in straight! That'll be your problem right there.
SSD prices are likely to increase globally due to contamination issues at Western Digital and Kioxia's NAND production facilities, and Apple devices may be affected (via TrendForce).
The M1 MacBook Air's SSD modules
Western Digital says that it has lost 6.5 exabytes worth of BiCS 3D NAND flash storage due to use of contaminated materials at two of its plants in Japan in January. The facilities are jointly run by Western Digital and its partner Kioxia, which was previously part of Toshiba. What caused the contamination and when production is expected to resume has yet to be confirmed.
Western Digital and Kioxia are among the world's leading SSD suppliers, with their joint production amounting to around 30 percent of the entire NAND flash market. TrendForce's market research indicates that the price of NAND, which is the main component of SSDs, could spike by up to 10 percent starting in the second quarter of 2022.
Western Digital and Kioxia primarily offer SSD and eMMC storage drives for PCs, but iFixit teardowns have shown that Apple uses Kioxia NAND chips in many of its products, including the iPhone 13 lineup, the iPad Pro, and the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Whether any existing Apple products manufactured with Kioxia storage in January will need to be recalled is currently unclear.
Many of Apple's Mac SSDs have been supplied by Samsung in recent years, but the company has increasingly turned to custom storage solutions, culminating in the proprietary SSD components on Apple's M1 Macs being soldered in place.
If Apple devices are not directly impacted by contaminated Kioxia hardware, it is still possible that a tightening of supply across the industry could drive up Apple's costs, but whether the company will absorb these price rises or pass them on to consumers is yet to be seen.
Article Link: Apple SSD Supplier Hit With Contamination Disaster, Flash Storage Prices Expected to Spike
To be fair I just got a 14” M1 Pro and the performance is better than our enterprise SSDs. Can’t really complain.
or, rather than post in a forum and come back for the answer, spend 0.47 seconds on Google.
Hopefully no recalls. Don't like to see a price hike but that might just happen. 
For $200, you can buy 2TB SSD from Samsung that are faster than the M1 SSD's. It is really overpriced
Google only gives me an answer and not a sense of connection like you, my friend
I will admit that that's way too many zeros for me to learn anything useful from this. Thanks tho!
Damn. Thanks for that education. Now if only my tiny little brain could somehow retain this information...
The dictionary is great - and so is google search - but they can't offer the sense of community you guys can. Extra points for the condescending presentation
I got a lot of replies, but this one is by far the most informative.
The way you just phrased it should have been in the article.
Many thanks!!
That's not actually true though.
The 970 EVO plus NVMe is about half as fast as what I've got in my MBP. I use one with a backup disk connected via a thunderbolt bridge.
The 980 PRO is closer but still no banana.