Gabriel Ferraz, maintainer of the TechPowerUp SSD database and content creator, recently published an article that shows relationship between SLC (Single-Level Cell) cache technology and its performance impact on SSDs. Using a Pichau Aldrin Pro 2 TB SSD featuring an Innogrit IG5236 controller and YMTC 128-layer TLC NAND, Gabriel has uncovered both the advantages and potential drawbacks of this feature. The article revealed that with the SLC cache enabled, the SSD achieved remarkable write speeds of up to 6579 MB/s within its sizable 691 GB cache. This pseudo-SLC (pSLC) cache acts as a high-speed buffer, temporarily storing data in a faster, single-bit-per-cell format before transferring it to the native TLC NAND. However, once this cache was exhausted, write speeds dropped to around 2159 MB/s in native TLC mode, further decreasing to 863 MB/s during the folding process where pSLC blocks are converted back to TLC.

Disabling the SLC cache delivers worse, but more stable results. While the peak write performance decreased significantly to about 2100 MB/s, the SSD demonstrated more consistent performance across extended write operations. Testing also examined the impact on power consumption and efficiency. With the SLC cache active, the SSD consumed approximately 5 W of power while achieving over 3000 MB/s bandwidth. Disabling the cache reduced power consumption but at the cost of halving the bandwidth to around 1900 MB/s, resulting in lower overall efficiency. Maximum power consumption with cache enabled peaked at 7.3 W, compared to a lower figure when operating in constant TLC mode. Below, you can see some performance benchmarks published on The Overclock Page.