In October Samsung took the stage on its Tech Day event and announced its SSD roadmap. One of the key elements of that roadmap was the project to launch QLC (quad-level cell) SSDs, and now we've got more information on these products. Several European online retailers -French and Italian- have already listed the new Samsung 860 QVO units, which means their official availability is near us.
The new SSD drives will feature the conventional 2.5-inch format with SATA interface, but the naming scheme changes from EVO or Pro to the new QVO, which stands for "Quality and Value Optimized SSD". Performance goes up to 550/520 MB per second for sequential read/write, and apparently these SSDs will feature 96,000 IOPS read and 89,000 IOPS write. There will be at least three variants: 1 TB (MZ-76Q1T0BW), 2 TB (MZ-76Q2T0BW) and 4 TB (MZ-76Q4T0BW), with prices of 117.50 euros, 225,96 euros and 451,93 euros (VAT excluded) according to those online retailers. Even with taxes included 19% would make 140, 270 and 540 euros), these are cheaper priced than the ones we can find on the Evo family (160, 380 and 850 euros at those storage capacities), for example. Some of these online shops mention December 2018 as the ETA.
The QLC technology (four-bit) allows to increase the storage density of current 3D NAND chips based on TLC (3-bit), but although cost can be lower on these chips, the complexity of the new technology could face disadvantages in performance and durability. Other QLC units like Intel's 660p or Crucial P1 don't perform that well in write tests if they run out of SLC cache. Real world use and benchmarks will for sure give more information on this potential issues.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
The new SSD drives will feature the conventional 2.5-inch format with SATA interface, but the naming scheme changes from EVO or Pro to the new QVO, which stands for "Quality and Value Optimized SSD". Performance goes up to 550/520 MB per second for sequential read/write, and apparently these SSDs will feature 96,000 IOPS read and 89,000 IOPS write. There will be at least three variants: 1 TB (MZ-76Q1T0BW), 2 TB (MZ-76Q2T0BW) and 4 TB (MZ-76Q4T0BW), with prices of 117.50 euros, 225,96 euros and 451,93 euros (VAT excluded) according to those online retailers. Even with taxes included 19% would make 140, 270 and 540 euros), these are cheaper priced than the ones we can find on the Evo family (160, 380 and 850 euros at those storage capacities), for example. Some of these online shops mention December 2018 as the ETA.
The QLC technology (four-bit) allows to increase the storage density of current 3D NAND chips based on TLC (3-bit), but although cost can be lower on these chips, the complexity of the new technology could face disadvantages in performance and durability. Other QLC units like Intel's 660p or Crucial P1 don't perform that well in write tests if they run out of SLC cache. Real world use and benchmarks will for sure give more information on this potential issues.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site