The SSD industry has been talking about TLC NAND for over three years now. We published our first post, Understanding TLC NAND, back in early 2012, but in three years we have actually seen very little TLC NAND making it to the SSD market. Samsung was an early adopter back in 2012, but aside from it and SanDisk weve yet to see any TLC drives enter the market. Silicon Motions SM2256 is set to change that because its the first commercially available controller and firmware combo with TLC support, which will enable companies like Kingston, ADATA and the like to use TLC NAND in their SSDs. We got an early reference design sample from Silicon Motion in for testing to see how the SM2256 stacks up with the competition, so read on to see our preliminary thoughts on the new controller.