[pkaye]

I worked on SSD firmware for more than a decade from the early days of SLC memory to TLC memory. SLC memory was so rock solid that you hardly needed any ECC protection. You could go months of use without any errors. And the most common error was erase error which just means to no longer use that back.

But then as the years progressed, the transistors were made smaller and MLC and TLC were introduced all to increase capacity but it made the NAND worse in every other way like endurance, retention, write/erase performance, read disturb. It also makes the algorithms and error recovery process more complicated.

Another difficult thing is recovering the FTL mapping tables from a sudden power loss. Having those power loss protection capacitors makes it so much more robust in every way. I wish more consumer drives included them. It probably just adds $2-3 to the product cost.