4 times less capacity but 100x or more endurance or retention at the same price looks like a great deal to me. Alternatively: do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

Plenty of people would be willing to pay for SLC mode. There is an unofficial firmware hack that enables it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578

1TB QLC SSDs are <$100 now. If the industry was sane, we would have 1TB SLC SSDs for less than $400, or 256GB ones for <$100, and in fact SLC requires less ECC and can function with simpler (cheaper, less buggy, faster) firmware and controllers.

But why won't the manufacturers let you choose? The real answer is clearly planned obsolescence.

I have an old SLC USB drive which is only 512MB, but it's nearly 20 years old and some of the very first files I wrote to it are still intact (I last checked several months ago, and don't expect it's changed since then.) It has probably had a few hundred full-drive-writes over the years --- well worn-out by modern QLC/TLC standards, but barely-broken-in for SLC.

The real answer is: no one actually cares.

Very few people have the technical understanding required to make such a choice. And of those, fewer people still would actually pick SLC over QLC.

At the same time: a lot of people would, if facing a choice between a $50 1TB SSD and a $40 1TB SSD, pick the latter. So there's a big incentive to optimize on cost, and not a lot of incentive to optimize on anything else.

This "SLC only" mode exists in the firmware for the sake of a few very specific customers with very specific needs - the few B2B customers that are actually willing to pay that fee. And they don't get the $50 1TB SSD with a settings bit flipped - they pay a lot more, and with that, they get better QC, a better grade of NAND flash chips, extended thermal envelopes, performance guarantees, etc.

Most drives out there just use this "SLC" mode for caches, "hot spot" data and internal needs.

> But why won't the manufacturers let you choose? The real answer is clearly planned obsolescence.

No, it's not. The real answer is that customers (Even B2B) are extremely price sensitive.

Look, I know the prevailing view is that lower quality is some evil corporate plan to get you to purchase replacements on a more frequent basis, but the real truth is that consumers are price sensitive, short sighted, and often purchasing without full knowledge. There's a race to the bottom on price, which means quality suffers. You put your typical customer in front of two blenders at the appliance store, one is $20 and the other is $50, most customers will pick the $20 one, even when armed with the knowledge that the $50 version will last longer.

When it comes to QLC vs SLC, buyers don't care. They just want the maximum storage for the smallest price.

> do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

Yes.

QLC SSDs are reliable enough for my day-to-day use, but even QLC storage is quite expensive and I wouldn't want to pay 4x (or realistically, way more than 4x) to get 2TB SLC M.2 drives instead of 2TB QLC M.2 drives.

Funny enough I just managed to find this exact post and comment on google 5 minutes ago when I started wondering whatever it's actually possible to use 1/4 of capacity in SLC mode.

Though what make me wonder is that some reviews of modern SSDs certainly mention that that pSCL is somewhat less than 25% of capacity, like 400GB pSLC cache for 2TB SSD:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/crucial-p310...

So you get more like 20% of SLC capacity at least on some SSDs

NVMe protocol introduced namespaces. Is it not the feature perfect for users to decide themselves, how to create 2 virtual SSDs with TLC and pseudo-SLC-mode, choosing how much space to sacrifice for pSLC?

> Alternatively: do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

If the original drive has sufficient reliability, then yes I do want that.

And the majority of consumers do, too.

Chasing absolute extreme highest powered off durability is not a priority for 99% of people when the drives work properly for typical use cases. I have 5 year old SSDs where the wear data is still in the single digit percentages despite what I consider moderately heavy use.

> I have an old SLC USB drive which is only 512MB, but it's nearly 20 years old and some of the very first files I wrote to it are still intact (I last checked several months ago, and don't expect it's changed since then.) It has probably had a few hundred full-drive-writes over the years --- well worn-out by modern QLC/TLC standards, but barely-broken-in for SLC.

Barely broken in, but also only 512MB, very slow, and virtually useless by modern standards. The only positive is that the files are still intact on that old drive you dusted off.

This is why the market doesn’t care and why manufacturers are shipping TLC and QLC: They aren’t doing a planned obsolescence conspiracy. They know that 20 years from now or even 10 years from now that drive is going to be so outdated that you can get a faster, bigger new one for pocket change.

> I have an old SLC USB drive which is only 512MB, but it's nearly 20 years old and some of the very first files I wrote to it are still intact (I last checked several months ago

It's not about age of drive. It's how much time it spent without power.

> If the industry was sane

Industry is sane in both the common and capitalist sense.

The year 2025 and people still buy 256Tb USB thumbdrives for $30, because nobody cares except for the price.