
Reality check?
A lot of the 7mm spinners are FRAGILE, I have seen dead units from being dropped less than two feet onto a pillow. A dual platter 7mm is as good idea as it sounds: PONY UP for an SSD or vet a laptop 2-3mm thicker IT WILL NOT KILL YOU.
Samsung is using its own *exact same* schtick only called DSP (Digital Signal Processing), to reduce damage and improve read reliability from TLC. This pushes writes up from 1000+ cycles to an average around 3500+ in the 840, and supposedly nearer 4000+ in the EVO last I read. It has to do with TLC having a tricky 8 possible voltage responses, which as the cell is rewritten will creep a bit. Signal processing is used to compensate for attenuated voltages and prevent bad writes or misread states. Further, the EVO has up to 3GB of SLC write buffer per 250GB advertised capacity. In the company's opinion that SLC is nearly 200 times more durable and can serve as write combine buffer/large sequential write buffer for the life of the drive.
Unless a magical technique such as microannealing inside each block becomes practical, TLC will be no possible threat to the usage of MLC and SLC for high availability I/O with heavy turnover. However the way it brings prices down, TLC may be very practical in next generation CHEAP laptop SSDs. Many of my service customers use less than 100GB currently, but would easily see benefit from improved startup times. The most useful thing from this article is "The Samsung 840 EVO may finally see real TLC based competition."
M
Unless 'magical' techniches