OCZ unveiled attendees of the Needham 5th Annual HDD & Memory Conference that the company plans on shipping triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND SSD drives in the first quarter of next year. Triple-level cell (TLC) technology, stores three bits of information per cell, whereas flash memory traditionally involves one (single-level) or two bits (multi-level) per cell. This type of NAND is approximately 30 percent cheaper than MLC NAND, which current SSDs mainly use. On the other hand, current TLC SSDs could have shelf lives as low as four years (around 1000 writes)

OCZ's new Indilinx Everest platform supports Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND components as well as next generation three bit per cell NAND Flash. The ability to leverage Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND Flash with proprietary Everest and Indilinx Ndurance Technology (nDurance 2) could provide SSD makers cost reductions associated with moving to the new process.

At the same event, OCZ unveiled the Intrepid 3 enterprise SSD based on the Indilinx Everest platform, available in capacities of up to 1TB.

Next year OCZ also plans to sample enterprise-grade SSDs that will support the NVM Express (Non-Volatile Memory express) interface. NVM Express is a scalable host controller interface designed to address the needs of Enterprise and Client systems that utilize PCI Express based solid state drives. The NVMe specification is specifically optimized for multi-core system designs that run many threads concurrently with each thread capable of instigating I/O operations. It's optimized for just the scenario that IT managers are hoping to leverage to boost IOPS. NVMe specification can support up to 64k I/O queues with up to 64k commands per queue. Each processor core can implement its own queue.

OCZ claims that the NVM Express will give the company's fifth generation PCIe SSD solutions will be capable of delivering up to 3.2 million IOPS,significanly more than the currently available Z-Drive R4 (up to 500,000 IOPS.)