How to check if your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus uses MLC or TLC based NAND Memory

BY Cody

Published 21 Nov 2014

If you’ve heard about iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users complaining about their device getting stuck in a boot loop because of the TLC flash memory installed by Apple, then you may want to check your own device to see if you could be looking at trouble down the road. So here is a tutorial on how to check if you have MLC or TLC based NAND memory in your device.

  • First, you will need to be jailbroken in order to complete this tutorial. If you are not jailbroken and need help then follow our simple step-by-step guide.
  • This is only applicable to 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, otherwise you should be fine.
  • If you’re on a Mac, you will be using Terminal to SSH into your device, if you’re on a Windows computer, then you can use PuTTY. In this tutorial we will be using Terminal.
  • Open Cydia and download “OpenSSH” and “IOKit Tools”
  • Get your IP address by opening the Settings app and tapping on “wifi” then tap on the “i” to show your IP address. You’ll be using this to SSH into your device.
  • Open Terminal and ssh into your device by typing: ssh root@yourIPaddress
    • password: alpine
  • Now type this command to display your devices characteristics: ioreg -lw0|grep “Device Characteristics”
  • Once you get an output, you will be looking for the text that says “default-bits-per-cell” as seen below

MLCTLC

 

If your “default-bits-per-cell” = 2 then that means you have MLC based NAND Memory, if “default-bits-per-cell” = 3 then that means you have TLC based NAND memory. If you have the TLC based memory then it’s possible you could have some issues down the road with your flash memory and it could even cause boot loops.

It has also been found that iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus with MLC based NAND consistently outperforms the one with TLC based NAND.

If you want a video walkthrough of this process, then check the video below:

Let us know if you have any issues through the process and let us know what type of memory you have!