Still almost double the price at which I would consider this good value tho ...
QLC has to beat like $.07/GiB at this point.
QLC sucks at providing value anyway. It only reduces the cost of the NAND by 25% and the cost of the NAND is about 1/5th the cost of a current 1TB drive:
20% NAND
20% controller, PCB, and other SMCs
20% R&D, tooling, assembly cost, production overheads
20% packaging, software/firmware, distribution, marketing, certification, validation blah blah blah.
20% margin for manufacturer.
The manufacturer sells 1000 drives to the retailer for ~$100 per unit, and the retailer will sell
one to you for $125.
If we do the same breakdown for a current 1TB QLC drive, it looks EXACTLY the same, apart from the NAND, which is now 25% cheaper, going from $20 in the example above to $15.
That $5 saving gets passed on to you but at $125 for a TLC drive that performs consistently in all conditions and has verifiable lower latencies and better endurance is a way better deal than the equivalent QLC drive for just $120. Perhaps if we were taking about a 4TB drive, the cost savings would be significant enough to convince some people - At 4TB the NAND costs would make up more like 80% of the overall production cost of the drive, and getting 25% lower NAND costs on that is a 20% saving. Still not great, but possibly enough to sway someone who is cost-sensitive and plans to do very little write-intensive work with the drive.
TL;DR
NAND isn't a significant enough portion of the overall cost to make it worth ruining a drive with QLC just to save $5.
