Impressive !
I do love the “wear leveling count” figure too… 
But yeah… MLC !
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Haha, well I’m fine with TLC or even QLC for that matter, if there’re enough chips.
My backup strategy is just syncthing on my phone vs my PC, a 1/2-2-1 backup, depending on where I am. (Yes, I’m cheap)
I’ve had optane (16GB, for pfsense) fail on me, so I don’t really trust even that.
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Yeah, MLC hits completely different. Seeing that average erase cycle hit 4,529 with zero errors really makes you appreciate how much headroom they engineered into these drives back then.
Looking back, these industrial-grade flavors of MLC—whether it’s eMLC or HET-MLC—were really the last hurrah of traditional NAND engineering before 3D XPoint took over. It was the absolute pinnacle of endurance before the entire industry shifted focus entirely toward chasing raw capacity and cost-cutting with TLC/QLC.
It’s just a shame that we’ll never see consumer or enthusiast drives built to this absolute standard again. The P3700 will definitely stay as the crown jewel of my AIC bias for a long time… until I manage to hunt down a P4800X or P5800X to finally finish the puzzle. 
Thanks for the great discussion, man! Glad to see fellow hardware hoarders who still appreciate the real deal. 
I bought this drive in January 2019… It is rated for a 600TBW endurance. Seeing as I wrote “only” 45TB to it in a little over 7 years, it should last me 93 years in total (86 more years to go… But I won’t last that long !). 
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Ah, the infamous 16GB Optane! That must have been the M10. To be fair to 3D XPoint, those little M10s had notorious design and bottleneck limitations, and they often just baked themselves to death in cramped, hot pfSense boxes. 
Interestingly, Intel actually fixed most of those issues with the Optane M15. The hardware was fully designed, production-ready, and literally on the verge of shipping before Intel corporate abruptly pulled the plug on the entire consumer Optane Memory lineup.
Looking back, consumer Optane was truly a classic case of “wrong product at the wrong time.” Technologies like SSHD or mSATA at least enjoyed a massive window of market prosperity when pure SSDs were still a luxury. But by the time Optane Memory came along, high-performance TLC NVMe drives were already becoming dirt cheap, completely crushing its value proposition.
But hey, love the honesty on the “1/2-2-1” backup strategy! Syncthing is awesome, and going full budget-mode with it is perfectly valid—until a rogue sync delete happens. Seeing everything from textbook 3-2-1 RAID5 setups to “0.5-device casual sync” is exactly why hardware forums are the best!
Huh, I didn’t know they had a newer gen that fixed things! Anyways, I loved those M10s for the purpose - cheap enough to buy as much as you want 2nd hand.
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Haha, yeah, you’re definitely not alone. A ton of people did exactly the same thing back then.
I actually have a 16GB M10 lying around too. A friend originally bought it for a NAS build but ended up just tossing it to me. Now it’s just a little piece of hardware history in my collection that I occasionally dig out to look at.
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what is the real difference between charge trap, replacement gate, floating gate?
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The short version is that “floating gate” and “charge trap” describe where the charge is stored in the NAND cell, while “replacement gate” is more of a process / structural approach, usually associated with modern charge-trap 3D NAND.
Intel/Micron’s early 3D NAND, including their early QLC generations, used floating-gate 3D NAND. Micron later moved away from legacy floating gate and adopted replacement-gate charge-trap NAND, notably from its 176-layer generation onwards.
So “Micron QLC vs Intel QLC” depends on the generation. Older Micron QLC and Intel QLC were much closer because they came from the joint Intel-Micron floating-gate 3D NAND line. Newer Micron QLC is a different path: replacement-gate charge-trap with CuA, while Intel/Solidigm’s older identity was more associated with floating-gate 3D NAND.
The more interesting point to me is not just “floating gate vs charge trap” as a cell-structure discussion. It is product-level trust.
Solidigm is still heavily associated with the old Intel floating-gate QLC lineage, but their enterprise QLC drives actually have a strong identity in the market. Drives like the D5-P5336 are not treated as random cheap QLC toys; they are positioned for high-density, read-intensive data centre use, and people do take them seriously in that role.
Micron’s newer QLC path is different. On paper, replacement-gate charge-trap NAND is technically interesting and helps with scaling, density and performance. But that does not automatically translate into the same level of field confidence.
At least from the product and RMA reputation side, I would be much more comfortable trusting Solidigm enterprise QLC than Micron QLC, especially when talking about long-term behaviour, ageing, cache exhaustion, firmware handling and real workload abuse.
So for me, “Micron QLC vs Intel/Solidigm QLC” is not only a NAND architecture question. It is also a question of which vendor has actually earned trust with QLC SSDs as complete products.
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nice details on that
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