I don't need that many write cycles, though. I need a good controller, which can give me both high speed and high reliability with more bits per cell.

So "should be" is not very enticing, especially if they want to charge 10x. As far as I can tell you can get generic flash chips and run them as SLC, so they should only need 3x the flash and 1x as much everything else.

And actually looking at the prices here, it's about $120 for 32 gigacells. If you get the SLC model then you're not paying 10x the cost per byte, you're paying 40x the cost per byte.

> so they should only need 3x the flash

No, (2^3)x, as in 8x

You're mixing things up.

TLC flash puts 3 bits into each cell. It's 3x as dense. The fact that it uses 8 voltage levels is only relevant to performance and durability.

(Also 2^1 versus 2^3 is not 8x anyway.)