A dynamic codeword transition ECC scheme is proposed for highly reliable solid-state drives, SSDs. By monitoring the error number or the write/erase cycles, the ECC codeword dynamically increases from 512 Byte (+parity) to 1 KByte, 2 KByte, 4 KByte ... 32 KByte. The proposed ECC with a larger codeword decreases the failure rate after ECC. As a result, the acceptable raw bit error rate, BER, before ECC is enhanced. Assuming a NAND Flash memory which requires 8-bit correction in 512 Byte codeword ECC, a 17-times higher acceptable raw BER than the conventional fixed 512 Byte codeword ECC is realized for the mobile phone application without an interleaving. For the MP3 player, digital-still camera and high-speed memory card applications with a dual channel interleaving, 15-times higher acceptable raw BER is achieved. Finally, for the SSD application with 8 channel interleaving, 13-times higher acceptable raw BER is realized. Because the ratio of the user data to the parity bits is the same in each ECC codeword, no additional memory area is required. Note that the reliability of SSD is improved after the manufacturing without cost penalty. Compared with the conventional ECC with the fixed large 32 KByte codeword, the proposed scheme achieves a lower power consumption by introducing the "best-effort" type operation. In the proposed scheme, during the most of the lifetime of SSD, a weak ECC with a shorter codeword such as 512 Byte (+parity), 1 KByte and 2 KByte is used and 98% lower power consumption is realized. At the life-end of SSD, a strong ECC with a 32 KByte codeword is used and the highly reliable operation is achieved. The random read performance is also discussed. The random read performance is estimated by the latency. The latency is below 1.5 ms for ECC codeword up to 32 KByte. This latency is below the average latency of 15,000 rpm HDD, 2 ms. 2010 (C) Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.