Sell me a 8 TB QLC SSD for $400 and I'll bite. That's what QLC is for: moving off of spinning rust and onto SSDs with my bulk storage. Until then, this is useless without MASSIVE price drops. They are trying to milk saps who can't tell the difference between SSDs (i.e. normal consumers) by not dropping prices... yet.
The race to the bottom for SSDs is coming. The manufacturers are just greedy enough not to want it to happen too soon.
But give me an 8TB or bigger SSD for $400 and I'll be the first to buy it. I'll even buy two!
Yeah no one's selling you 8TB for $400 anytime soon. Aside from the fact that the R&D costs for QLC need to be recuperated first & companies need to reinvest an increasing amount for future development, there's also a point after which it doesn't make sense for the SSD, or NAND, maker to sell these at a loss.
If you really want something that big, for dirt cheap, try spinners instead.
So you think the 860 QVO will stay at 15c/GB for the rest of it's time on the market or have you not seen high prices at launch, for any other product before this?
Early adopter tax? Samsung is usually the first to launch "one of a kind" products in the retail market & they get the ball rolling for many of the innovations in this industry. The prices would come down sooner if the competitors launch their SATA QLC drives quickly.
Yeah, the problem here is that the QVO is not a "one of a kind product"—in every possible aspect and scenario it's either the same as the EVO or worse, sometimes very substantially so, without being substantially cheaper. Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO. In order to compete with it favorably the QVO needs to be at least 25% cheaper to offset the disadvantages. In other words, under 11 c/GB. Until then nobody would be willing to give this inferior product the time of the day.
>moozooh QVO is the first SATA QLC drive, so yeah first of it's kind unless we're being pedantic. As for the price ~ it should & will likely come down soon enough.
>Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO.
The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price.
> "QVO is the first SATA QLC drive, so yeah first of it's kind unless we're being pedantic." The fact that it's the first or the only doesn't matter to anyone who's buying things based on anything resembling a performance/price ratio. It's the first to be inferior to an already existing product. Who would be the early adopter of something that's clearly worse than something else that costs more or less the same?
> the price ~ it should & will likely come down soon enough So why didn't Samsung recommend a lower price to begin with, considering how badly this products needs it? I'm sure they follow the market close enough to see this series competes with their own EVO (and loses hands-down).
> The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price. Yet this makes the QVO more attractive for you, especially considering it doesn't even feature a 500 GB model? I don't understand your argument. The point is this drive needs to be much, much cheaper than the EVO to be attractive at all. The downsides of the QLC NAND are numerous and significant; they need to be offset using the price. It's also clear this is where the multi-bit madness should end, because QLC is already encroaching onto the HDD territory in certain aspects (except the price, sadly) and scenarios. If PLC were a thing, I'd most likely stay away from it even if it were cheaper than hard drives. That's just asking for trouble, like those glass platters in IBM's Deskstar 75GXP (one of the most disastrous HDD series of all time).
>The fact that it's the first or the only doesn't matter to anyone who's buying things based on anything resembling a performance/price ratio.
The fact is you quoted me when I said first of a kind, which holds true for this drive, end of!
>So why didn't Samsung recommend a lower price to begin with, considering how badly this products needs it?
I dunno, how about you ask Samsung why didn't they sell the 860 EVO for $130 at launch?
>Yet this makes the QVO more attractive for you, especially considering it doesn't even feature a 500 GB model?
Yes because the QVO model, when it launches here, should be cheaper ($/GB) than the EVO drives. It's not like I can't afford $130 drive, but the 1TB or 2TB would be better VFM for me, considering I'm looking to replace some HDDs permanently. The EVOs would probably still be 40~60% more expensive.
> The fact is you quoted me when I said first of a kind, which holds true for this drive, end of! Once again, the fact that I'm pointing out is that it is a non-argument. Early adopter premium only exists for something that such an early adopter would want to have NO MATTER THE COST. Such as a new feature or better performance with existing features. Here, the cost is the ONLY thing an early adopter would want about it and the only potential advantage, period. Why do you not see how you're not making sense? "One of a kind" is an idiotic argument to use for the product that's intended to be cheaper, not better.
> I dunno, how about you ask Samsung why didn't they sell the 860 EVO for $130 at launch? They launched the 860 EVO at the same time with the 860 Pro with a significant enough difference in MSRP that one didn't cannibalize the other, and the EVO was also fast enough to overtake most of the competition widely available at that price point. So the pricing made sense at the time, not so much here.
> The EVOs would probably still be 40~60% more expensive. Hopefully so, but Samsung's lack of aggression and insight in undercutting their own existing product is disappointing. They are well aware of the going price of the EVO.
We're forgetting arguably the most important thing ~ yields. There were some (unconfirmed) reports that QLC yields were below par, so it's quite possible that these products being priced so close to TLC drives is a result of that.
I don't really think yields are important. It's not an attribute for customer to base their decisions on, it's not something that can be tested or seen, and needn't be either—it's the manufacturer's problem. After all, customers aren't altruists and aren't out there to help Samsung or any other vendor do their business—what they need to care about is that the products they buy are priced fairly. Samsung won't convince anyone to overpay for QLC because the yields are too low to justify a fair price.
Two possible ways to handle this launch better would be either to bite the bullet and suggest a sensible MSRP from the get go or stabilize the technology before coming out with the product and selling it at a healthy margin. Either way there won't be many people buying this until it's sufficiently cheap so the difference isn't as big as it might feel.
'Yields don't matter to initial consumer product pricing' is a pretty spicy take. It doesn't matter whether the consumers want to be altruistic (definitely not the correct usage here), this is the price if you want high density SSD storage in a single unit, like it or not. You clearly don't, so kindly shut up and move on.
If you're knowingly buying from an expensive source, you're buying it wrong. If you insist on buying it wrong, then stop wasting other people's time with your BS. Time to hit eBay, nowadays Taobao may help.
"Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO. The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price." Assuming the 500GB EVO actually costs as much as the 1TB EVO in your country (I'm frankly skeptical about this, but let's take you at your word) what makes you thing that the 1TB QVO will not in turn cost as much as the 2TB QVO? Are you seriously suggesting that your country's taxmen or tariffmen are going to place much lower taxes/tariffs on QLC based SSDs than one TLC based SSDs?
Even at 25% cheaper than an EVO it would barely beat the (current) best sale price of other mainstream TLC SSD... And TLC is probably not going away any time soon. I'd love to see the price gap reach 25%+ sooner rather than later tho.
It may be that companies are hoping for higher margin. It is not impossible for that to happen. CDs, for example, were a higher margin product than the LPs they replaced.
If supply of TLC shrinks, as companies move to QLC production, the competition between TLC and QLC also shrinks, making room, potentially, for more margin.
The yields are poor at the moment so there is no point selling them low. It has a big effect on your share price if you release new game changing technology like QLC to market, because shareholders are sophisticated and understand the long term term strategy here.
> The yields are poor at the moment so there is no point selling them low. I think you misunderstand: there's no point *buying them high*. The only point of these drives is buying them low. So not selling them low means *not selling them*, period.
Customers may not be shareholders, but they aren't idiots, either. They understand QLC is a step down in almost every aspect of the drive's operation. It's an inferior product, and the price needs to reflect that for it to be considered for purchase.
Actually , R&D is surprisingly low compared to the revenue generated and, aside from that, they might be close enough to 5 cents per GB production costs now for QLC so if there is a global economic crash caused by Trump and his tariffs, we could see 50$ per TB in half a year from now. Otherwise, could be 2020-2021 for that kind of price, especially if China manages to ramp output. NAND prices are down a bit from peak but folks still have 40-50% overall NAND margins,there is room for much lower prices and production costs decline 15-25% per year.
>they might be close enough to 5 cents per GB production costs now for QLC
Sure but that's at least 6~12 months away from now. So how can anyone realistically expect Samsung to debut the QVO at such prices given there's no competition (SATA QLC) nor any reason for Samsung to not make hay while the sun shines? For anyone who says the $130 US for 1TB EVO is the normal price, it's not in the ROTW.
“Yeah no one's selling you 8TB for $400 anytime soon. Aside from the fact that the R&D costs for QLC need to be recuperated first & companies need to reinvest an increasing amount for future development, there's also a point after which it doesn't make sense for the SSD, or NAND, maker to sell these at a loss.
If you really want something that big, for dirt cheap, try spinners instead.”
You sound like a Samsung shill. If HDD manufacturers decide to keep on R&D for those spinners, are you willing to pay extra for their future development? Beside, SSD tech has been around for a decade, now it costs less to make an SSD than to make an HDD for the same capacity.
Oh sure let's all forget the aftermath of the Thai floods ~ insane prices, insane quality (as in really bad) w/warranties as low as just a year long! So while the HDD makers sat on their collective behind, much like Intel, the SSD makers out paced them, out innovated(?) them & could make spinners virtually obsolete, except bottom of the barrel 5400/5900 rpm drives especially in $/GB.
So let's see, arguing for higher prices because R&D is an ever increasing (one time) cost that needs to be recuperated, is shilling now? Do you also want me to feel sad because vacuum tubes are dead or that NAND prices will continue to fall, in the foreseeable future?
I could use a big SSD myself, but at this price I'm better off picking up an EVO or WD 3D NAND instead.
I'm sure it will drop in a couple of months and we may even see the 1TB hit the $99 mark. Samsung QLC is looking pretty decent, overall endurance isn't much worse than my WD Blue 1TB 3D NAND, though smaller capacities drop off horribly.
What conditions? SLC lasts a LONGGGgggggg time powered off. Decades.
MLC on a lightly used drive is also years and years. TLC is also measured in years on a lightly used drive under the right conditions.
Yes, an abused TLC drive today, left in a hot car in the summer time is going to start getting corrupt bits in a matter of a few weeks. That isn't most people's use case and for bulk storage, TLC at least kept vaguely room temperature has a storage life of something >1yr even when pushing up near the P/E endurance of the drive. I forget what JEDEC calls for (or whoever the standards body is), but the P/E endurance on TLC IIRC is 9 months at room temperature. IE your drive should typically not lose any stored bits when at room temperature and powered off for 9 months once you have exhausted your P/E endurance (obviously going past it reduces the powered off endurance as well as the potential for other things, like blocks not being able to be written to due to high power requirements or not being able to differentiate voltages, etc.)
I don't know what the endurance on QLC is supposed to be, but IIRC it is still measured in multiple months at the limit of P/E endurance (and typically when new the cold/off endurance of a drive is several times longer than when it is at the end of its life). I wouldn't want to use QLC, TLC or even MLC or SLC as archival storage that is supposed to last decades, but HDDs could be problematic for decadal storage also.
Honestly? Give me a 4TB for $300 and I start getting tempted. I have an array of 4 3TB spinning rust (5900 RPM even) disks I would love to upgrade to SSDs and at least a moderate size increase. I'd prefer 6TB or 8TB disks, so I can double the array size, but 4TB at a reasonable price gets tempting.
Wait. Just wait. Every time the capacity goes up and the price goes down, another poster comes along with a new higher capacity they want at a new lower price. You'll get it one day but right now it's physically impossible.
Ha, I came here to say this. These guys would (supposedly) have jumped at these capacity/price/speed/endurance combinations a year ago, but now, oh no, they're way too expensive. It's a wonder they ever buy anything at all...
My limit has always been spending $600-800 to replace the storage in my desktop and server. Right now I am utilizing 3.5TiB of the 5.4TiB capacity of my 2x3TB RAID0 arrays. Now that has been creeping up. 12 months ago it was probably 2.8-2.9TiB utilized. At any rate, I need enough performance (minimum 250MB/sec sustained large transfers once SLC cache is exhausted, or if below, it better be very close to that figure) to not need feel the need to make a RAID array so I can run JBOD and add disks as my storage pool gets utilized so they don't need to all be matching drives.
4TB would maybe just barely cut it, but it also likely wouldn't leave me enough growth room as I'd be running out to add probably 2TB disks in a few months. 5-6TB would probably be enough to last me 18-24 months before I'd need to add any disks.
Anyway, so you are talking 10TB of total storage (minimum) for no more than about $800. My song hasn't changed on that in the last couple of years. We still aren't there. Though getting close. 8 cents a GB isn't THAT far away. And by the time we get there, my needs might have only creeped up to 12TB for the same no more than $800 (and who knows, maybe in a couple more years I could gin up another $100 or $200 to get it, even if prices haven't gotten down to 6-7 cents a GB).
So if I was looking at 3x2TB drives in JBOD and could just add another 2TB disk to it as my storage got filled up for a measly ~$350 between both machines every couple of years (and hopefully getting cheaper each time I did it, or it is cheaper enough when I need more capacity a couple years after building the SSD storage pools to get a new 4TB disk for each machine or something).
One of the things I don't like have HDDs and RAID (well it would be the same with SSDs and RAID) is really needing matching drives. So if my storage runs low, it means replacing entire arrays instead of just adding a new disk to provide the extra capacity, but being able to keep both higher performance and keeping a unified volume.
Right now my minimum HDD standard once I start hitting capacity/performance limits is probably going to be getting a set of Seagate Barracuda Pro drives for the performance of 7200rpm spindle speeds. That means 2x2x4TB drives (so 4 drives total) which is around $600 right now, and only gets me 1/3rd more capacity...
In other words I'd likely need to replace both arrays again maybe 3 years later (at most). Going to 2x2x6TB drives might make longer term financial sense, but it also has a startup cost of around $1000.
"They are trying to milk saps" There's no evidence whatsoever for that claim. TLC drives weren't cheaper than MLC when they started out, now they (mostly) are - it's how product introductions work. The same will happen here. Enough of the bleating and moving of goalposts to ridiculous locations already.
Yeah the premise was cheaper NAND for bulk storage with compromises. That way all okay in my mind. But as shown, there's just no good value proposition here yet. Just inherently I figured QLC would be 33% cheaper than TLC and then mass production and the higher density stacking would bring that down further. But...I guess not.
My price point is roughly 8 cents a GB and performance of at least 250MB/sec sustained writes/reads.
Which these aren't at. That might mean a few more generations of TLC drives to get there. I don't know. My use case is replacing the spinning rust in my desktop and server. I mirror storage between them and I am running dual 1GbE interfaces with SMB Multichannel. So I can push about 235MB/sec across.
Sometimes I am just shoving a few GB file (sometimes one or two single digit MB sized files, but more often larger ones). On rare occasions I am backing up completely from one machine to the other, because reasons. So when tossing 2-3TB of data, I don't need my transfer "stalling" at 80MB/sec, or even 160MB/sec. Hopefully soon networking prices on 2.5/5/10GbE will drop enough I will upgrade there. I don't necessarily need to saturate a 2.5GbE, let alone 5 or 10GbE interface with big transfers.
So my benchmark is 250MB/sec sustained on full disk transfers. That way I don't need to set up drives in RAID to accommodate higher speeds. As one of things I am looking forward to/hoping for with SSDs is being able to move to storage pools/JBOD type setup so that as I start pushing my capacity limits, I can just add a new drive, rather than needing to replace an entire array. And those sustained speeds better be able to manage that with the disk 80-90% full. One of those things that makes me shy away from using HDD arrays that full is the performance suffers a lot once you start getting that far in on the tracks (my current 2x3TB RAID0 arrays can push about 320MB/sec when on the outer tracks, on the inner ones it is only about 190MB/sec).
Once of these days I could justify dishing out $600-800 to replace my 2x3TB arrays with 5-6TB of storage in each machine. Especially if it is storage that I can potentially keep using for a long time (I don't know, call it a decade or so) by just adding a new disk once capacity starts getting low, rather than replacing all of them. But I need/want good performance while I am at it.
For my server I can still comfortably live with a 60GB system drive. When I upgrade it, I will likely FINALLY replace the old SATAII SSD in there with a newer SATAIII 120GB SSD or get an M.2 120GB depending on what the board will support. Basically the smallest capacity I can get. It doesn't need heaps of performance. My desktop I will likely get a 500GB M.2 TLC drive once I finally upgrade it (currently running a last generation 256GB TLC SATAIII drive as the system disk).There I'd like some nice performance, but frankly a good M.2 TLC drive with 512GB is big enough jump in performance I don't care to spend the money on an MLC drive for the system disk.
This is great and a step closer to getting rid of spinning drives but they are not there yet. The prices of these Samsung drives are far better at the 4TB range but I just picked up a 4TB WD Blue for $99 Canadian on the black Friday sales granted that same drive before the sale was $209.99 Canadian but even still far cheaper than the $599.99US for the Samsung 4TB almost SSD drive.
With all of that said I am very happy to see large TB drives for SSD coming into a lower price range probably going to be another 5-6 years before the prices match for spinning and SSD drives or if Seagate and WD totally stop making spinning drives then of coarse we have nothing to fall back on if we want large TB hard drives in our systems for data storage and we will have to pay the price of these types of SSD drives.
On a side note my fear is that when Seagate and WD stop making spinning drives SSD drive prices might sky rocket because we have no other option. The only reason SSD drives are coming down in the larger sizes is these companies are trying to compete with large TB spinning drives on price points.
I'm not sure SSD's will ever pass up HD's for $ per GB for pure bulk storage. Even the "Cheap" 4tb SSD is around the cost of 2x 10 TB HDs so somewhere around 5X more expensive in $ per GB. Not an impossible margin but still a lot of ground to make up vs a moving target. What has happened is SSDs have gotten "big enough" and "cheap enough" that for many people they are viable as the only drive in their machine. Looking at Newegg it's ~$45 for your basic 1tb hd and you can pick up a cheap ~250gb SSD for a little less or a ~512gb SSD for a little more. I'd certainly prefer a 250 or 512 gb SSD as the drive in my system over a 1tb HD but if you do need bulk storage (1tb+) HDs are still hard to beat. 3TB hd's start off at ~$85 and continue to be more cost effect at higher sizes so I don't think HDs will completely vanish. They may become increasingly specialized to bulk storage and cloud providers with things like SMR trading off some performance for increased density but I doubt they will go away. Cheap PC mfgs do still seem to like the cheap 1tb hds. About the same cost as a small but usable SSD but give big numbers for the ads.
It's about 10 years ago that I bought an Intel 80GB drive for $250. We're getting 2TB flash for that now - about a factor of 25 times reduction in price.
For comparison, in 2008 the biggest HDDs were apparently 1.5TB in size; that drive launched at ~$215 (although it rapidly dropped afterward). For comparison a 14TB Ironwolf is $530 at B&H. That's 9.3x more capacity at at 2.4x the price; or roughly at 3.8x improvement in price per TB at the top end. Or only 2.7x is you use the ~$150 price estimated price for nov 08.
Flash might end up needing to drop 10x in price per TB to beat spinning rust; but it has momentum behind it, and the more market share it wins based on size/power/performance the more economies of scale and larger R&D budgets will tilt the floor in its favor.
Ever heard of law of diminishing returns? At 1st tech is hard to produce and sell than it scales till you reach a wall, same with flash cards at the times of N64, 32-64MB for $100.
Even HDD's which a well known tech is having a hard time executing the next step, HAMR which should boost capacities to 20-50TB, 4 years of delay.
HDD's sweet spot for manufacturers is the 4TB and up, they can't really make them cheaper than $40-50 no matter the size, it got tons of physical moving parts, a big chunk of well crafted aluminum, special sealing, etc vs an SSD that is just nand and a plastic casing before at least you got a thin aluminum case.
Spinning drives aren't going away - capacities are still going up and spinning drives are still the best deal for extremely high capacity storage - like NAS and datacentre storage. That's unlikely to change any time soon. But the amount of storage that you're realistically going to want inside your computer? It's now affordable to go all SSD for your local internal storage.
But storage inside your laptop has until now been a case of needing two drives, a fast SSD to boot off of and a slow HDD for your data. Or else pay a ton for a high capacity SSD, or make do with a small drive
Lower cost (QLC) higher capacity SSDs are very welcome. Is as simple as that. I read an interesting study that basically concludes that an SSD lifespan is usually limited by age not total writes. Interesting. Can anybody confirm or deny?
Not really. SSDs don't tend to die of old age or exhausted endurance (not in client workloads anyway) but rather random controller faulires and firmwar bugs.
One considuration with such flash is data retention. As these are fairly large drives, they will be used for storage and hence this can become an issue.
Quickly skimming the article, it does seem to suggest, that age has an effect on raw bit errors. What it doesn't include (not that i can find) is wheter drives were the same model and manufacturer.
Older drives could be of inferior controllers and weaker firmware design which can't cope with bit errors as well.
Personally I think the Intel 660p NVMe SSD's offer a very nice price performance tradeoff when on sale. Yesterday an Intel 660p 1TB drive was on sale for $130. At around 1800Mbps it's ~ 3.5X faster than a SATA ssd and about 45% cheaper than a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVMe drive. OK, so it's 1800Mbps vs 3200Mbps but again for my uses that is certainly excellent speed improvement from a SATA ssd and I'm willing to accept some of the other shortcomings of QLC. My experience is that QLC is already a very reasonable value proposition for many applications.
While I have nothing against the Intel 660p, not QLC, and I very much welcome these technologies, even considering black friday """deals""", I still don't think it has become price competitive (yet).
I purchased an 860 EVO 1TB for $127 ($127 after tax/shipping), and then later an MX500 2TB for $209 ($229 after tax/shipping). (Bought the 860 EVO 1TB since the 2TB was $299 and therefore much more expensive in $/GB, and because I hadn't seen anything better by the time it was Saturday, but CyberMonday on Amazon brought the $209 MX500. I may or may not return the 860 EVO.)
Both of these drives are 3D TLC based, and still have their marginal sustained read/write advantages over 3D QLC. Given the (roughly) equivalent price between a 1TB 860 EVO 1TB and Intel 660p 1TB, I don't think it's unfair to say that the 860 EVO should be every customer's pick every single time (again, given these """deal""" prices).
As always, it'll take some time before newer technologies drop in prices and mature in overall value. I'm sure it'll happen for QLC drives, as they did with MLC and TLC before them, but it just hasn't happened quite yet.
Wait what? The 2TB MX500 hit $209 this year? Was it a flash sale or something? I had price alerts set on it, the 860 EVO, and the WD Blue/SanDisk Ultra and the cheapest I saw for a 2TB was $255... Granted I was mostly looking at Amazon, where'd you score that deal?
Bleh, googling revealed that WAS on Amazon... It never triggered my price alerts, hrm, even tho it's definitely showing on Camelcamel's price history now, weird. Maybe I glossed over it entirely, oh well.
Can you do a data retention test ? Like writing the drive with data (H2testw seems to be the pick of the bunch) and disconnecting it. I'm interested how data retention holds up over time.
Don't use SSDs for cold storage. Testing this is absurdly stupid and a waste of a reviewers time.
Disconnect drive for 10 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep. Disconnect drive for 15 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep. Disconnect drive for 20 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep. (We're already at 45 days, or 1.5 months, and chances are the data's still all there, are you getting how and why this kind of testing is stupid?) By the time you get to sufficiently long enough time periods to see some change in data you'd have wasted over a year trying to find a time period (within 5 days) where you know the drive will start losing data. This is just as absurd as asking reviewers to test NAND flash endurance by hammering the drive 24/7 for years until it dies. By the time it DOES die something better will have already arrived on the market. And disregarding all that, testing with a sample size of ONE is not indicative of any relevant performance characteristics for your ONE drive.
If you want to use cold storage backups, either use a mechanical hard drive, a tape drive, or invest in cloud storage and encrypt your data before uploading it.
Testing the cold storage capabilities of a sample size of ONE QLC SSD does nothing but prove that it's a less satisfactory use case for the technology than using a mechanical hard drive.
I _think_ you can find Google or Facebook statistics on their SSDs, error rate etc. in representative volumes. But ofc it is enterprise grade hardware.
You're not thinking very far. As QLC is very cheap, it will be used in likes of flash drives, SD cards and portable SSDs. With these, it's not expected for them to be powerred at all time and in the case of sd cards and flash drives, it's not likely controller would do any kind of data rewritting.
So this is very much a relavant test, that might give us ideas on how it performs. And no, you don't have to wait a year to see something; data curruption can be presented a lot sooner if from of read error and slower read speed in general. A more extreme approach is to heat the drive, which accelarates the process.
Horrible performance by samsung 64 layer qlc nand. Way slower than intel's/micron's . Especially the 4k random reads are slower than my first ssd 10 years ago, the intel x-25m.
In order for samsung 860 qvo to make sense, it should be priced below 0.10$/gb
Still leaps and bounds beyond 7200RPM hard drives, but not great either. If we could just get to SATA3 equivalent performance at this price/GB, it would be great. 4TB for that cheap is pretty awesome though, I might grab one if it goes on sale.
Your review conclusion was much easier on this drive than the Tech Report review.
Basically buy a 860Evo this drive is trash is what I get when I read all the reviews on the net today. Only people that don't follow the industry will be suckered into buying these because of that attractive low price.
Like everything in this world you get what you pay for.
I didn't want to over-emphasize the price issue because I don't think that situation will last very long. Samsung may end up dropping prices before the QVO even hits the shelves, and within a few months I think it will be significantly cheaper than the EVO, which means it should also be cheaper than all the other mainstream TLC drives and the handful of high-capacity DRAMless TLC drives. Once the novelty wears off and the pricing settles down, I fully expect the QVO to end up being a very reasonable entry-level buy.
This sort of forward-thinking bigger-picture non-knee-jerk reviewing is why I keep coming back to AnandTech. People can pan this drive and QLC all they want, but Samsung's gonna be laughing all the way to the bank once QLC starts eating HDDs' lunch, and then those same sites that trashed them will be calling them visionary.
BTW Billy, please do keep us updated on the 4TB failures you saw - since that capacity is likely going to be the best in terms of cost/GB, a lot of people will be considering 4TB Samsung SSDs, and if there is a controller/firmware/NAND issue lurking it would be great to know about it beforehand.
I know it's an odd request but I don't follow reviews as much as I used to. I'd love to see a couple of graphs on this chart, just showing perhaps a very early generation SSD or even a regular high end 7200RPM hard drive.
Scale is all but lost when you don't recognise the disks it's comparing against. I know the 860/960 Evos are powerful, I can see this disk is much slower, but will it totally destroy a hard drive or Intel G2 160GB classic in all benchmarks? Etc
Well sure it will destroy a hard drive! It's slower than the EVO but still is a pretty good SSD. It's aimed at people who want high capacity for as least money as possible. I bet if the list price is $150, it will probably end up costing about $20 less than an equivalent EVO.
It's like comparing the PRO to the EVO, it's more expensive but has higher performance. But any of these quality SSD totally beat spinning disks particularly when it's not just sequential reads. In normal use, sequential reads are less common than the arm of the drive going back and forth over the surface reading blocks from all over the place, and you can hear it like a chattering sound, sometimes annoying. Those reads slow the drive down to a crawl usually. That's what makes the SSD so superior, there is no waste of time while a mechanical arm positions itself repetitively over various blocks on a spinning surface. On an SSD all the data is equally instantly available no matter where it exists in the cell matrix in the chips...
Honestly I'd like for SSHDs to get a reboot, especially with this higher capacity QLC that also acts like SLC when needed. The current SSHDs I think have a max of 8GB of NAND and 2TB (I think) of platter. I'd love to see maybe 128GB of NAND and 4TB or 5TB of platter, at least for 2.5" form factor.
It seems to me like the move from TLC to QLC is not just a bit worse, but monumentally so. QLC would have to be a LOT cheaper than TLC to warrant a purchase, not just a bit.
"The current street prices for the 860 EVO are lower than the 860 QVO for two out of three capacities, and that's comparing against one of the best SATA SSDs out there."
Which makes QLC as a worthless product. I don't think 25% off the cheapest TLC SSDs would be enough, because it seems even worse than that.
In the end, it's good to see this quad tech coming to the consumers. We're now within striking distance for true HDD to SSD storage/mirror conversion. In the next year or two, pricing will lower enough for many to make the leap.
YES! Finally! Samsung GETS it! 512GB QLC models should not exist. Even 512GB models with current 3D TLC don't reach the parallelism performance sweet spot. The 2TB model, when priced right, should all but eliminate the case for consumer 2.5in HDDs.
I just had 2 Samsung QLC 3 bit drives die this year alone. They were less than 1.5 year old. I'm never buying Samsung's EVO line again. It will be Pro from here on out. 4 bit drives will fail even faster.
I was starting to get excited about 2TB for $300 but then I looked up 2TB HDDs and they're about $60. Still a huge price differential especially as I usually want at least one extra drive for nightly backups, although perhaps the backup drive could be the HDD?
$149.99 launch price is encouraging even if it is currently more than the 860evo. The 860evo launched for over $300 (closer to $330) and is now $139. If the qvo follows this pattern we can look forward to sub $65 for the 1tb qvo and maybe even $250 for 4tb.
I think these QLC drives are a bad idea especially in the way they're being marketed. I'm not even talking about performance, the speed reduction I could live with. However, they're orders of magnitude worse in P/E cycles, retention, and endurance. These manufacturers know this and they're preying on the lack of education and focusing on price. Even so far as advertising these drives (this one in particular) as using 4 bit MLC memory (which 4 bit MLC is *always* QLC) implying that it is on safer MLC memory:
The fundamental issue is that 2-bit MLC should have been accurately named DLC in the first place, it's not like somebody's gonna mix that up with downloadable content.
Could we get some numbers from some mechanical drives, WD or Seagate 1TB or 2TB, in comparison to the slower QLC drives?
I'd like to see how they hold up against the QLC in random and sustained reads/writes. The latency might be the deciding factor even though I've got some mechanical drives that can beat them on sustained reads/writes.
Who in their right mind would purchase a QVO drive when the EVO is similarly priced? These drives perform poorly and have horrible longevity. 160MB/s writes after the cache!!!! I will not even touch the smaller EVO drives because the write speed is so low (500GB is ok but 1TB is so affordable now it is my minimum).
Anand, please consider debunking the myth of data retention being limited to a few months.
Really, where this myth originates from, f.e. if one buys QVO for backups what is the safe-time-between-losing-data?
My proposal is to fill the drive with 900GB 7z archive and test the integrity after, say, 6 months.
I myself am planning to buy the 1TB QVO just to find how durable it is under superheavy REAL-WORLD random read/writes - QD1. By the way, you are using 16GB spans in your tests, but the SLC is bigger than that, don't you see a problem?
Here we are about 9 months later - August 2019 - and the price of Intel's 660p 1TB model has dropped by 50% when it's on sale. So, for $85 - $95 you can get an NVMe drive with, say, 750GB of usable capacity and it will blow all of these SATA SSDs out of the water. In other words, if you don't fill the drive over about 75% full you'll have a smokin' fast rig.
As a professional many comments here disregard what these drives are intended for and for obvius reasons you wouldn't want to buy them for a server array or high availability applications. Samsung has entered a product which is now competing with lower priced product \ brands. For the average consumer looking for a Samsung branded drive to be used as a basic storage drive for documents, photos, music and game storage it makes a lot of sense. Admittedly IMHO buying a 2TB SSD for general storage use at the $200 mark is extreme in comparison to $80 for a spinner but for some users but for gamers it may be worth the price to use as game storage drive.
Question: If the SLC-cache is full, the speed drops, that´s clear. But what happened if the SSD have a power loss directly after the data-writing ends? Is all Data still accessable on the SSD (because data still have to be copied from the SLC-cache to the QLC)?
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stanleyipkiss - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Sell me a 8 TB QLC SSD for $400 and I'll bite. That's what QLC is for: moving off of spinning rust and onto SSDs with my bulk storage. Until then, this is useless without MASSIVE price drops. They are trying to milk saps who can't tell the difference between SSDs (i.e. normal consumers) by not dropping prices... yet.The race to the bottom for SSDs is coming. The manufacturers are just greedy enough not to want it to happen too soon.
But give me an 8TB or bigger SSD for $400 and I'll be the first to buy it. I'll even buy two!
R0H1T - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Yeah no one's selling you 8TB for $400 anytime soon. Aside from the fact that the R&D costs for QLC need to be recuperated first & companies need to reinvest an increasing amount for future development, there's also a point after which it doesn't make sense for the SSD, or NAND, maker to sell these at a loss.If you really want something that big, for dirt cheap, try spinners instead.
shabby - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
How will they recoup the price when no one is going to buy this? The evo 860 is cheaper.R0H1T - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
So you think the 860 QVO will stay at 15c/GB for the rest of it's time on the market or have you not seen high prices at launch, for any other product before this?shabby - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Obviously no, but why launch it at this price from the start. Should of launched it at $99 for 1tb that would probably get it some fanfare.R0H1T - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Early adopter tax? Samsung is usually the first to launch "one of a kind" products in the retail market & they get the ball rolling for many of the innovations in this industry. The prices would come down sooner if the competitors launch their SATA QLC drives quickly.shabby - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I doubt anyone will be rushing to the store to buy these.Ironchef3500 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
+1Jad77 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
"I doubt anyone will be rushing to the store to buy these."That is the perfect one-line review!
moozooh - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Yeah, the problem here is that the QVO is not a "one of a kind product"—in every possible aspect and scenario it's either the same as the EVO or worse, sometimes very substantially so, without being substantially cheaper. Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO. In order to compete with it favorably the QVO needs to be at least 25% cheaper to offset the disadvantages. In other words, under 11 c/GB. Until then nobody would be willing to give this inferior product the time of the day.R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>moozoohQVO is the first SATA QLC drive, so yeah first of it's kind unless we're being pedantic. As for the price ~ it should & will likely come down soon enough.
>Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO.
The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price.
moozooh - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
> "QVO is the first SATA QLC drive, so yeah first of it's kind unless we're being pedantic."The fact that it's the first or the only doesn't matter to anyone who's buying things based on anything resembling a performance/price ratio. It's the first to be inferior to an already existing product. Who would be the early adopter of something that's clearly worse than something else that costs more or less the same?
> the price ~ it should & will likely come down soon enough
So why didn't Samsung recommend a lower price to begin with, considering how badly this products needs it? I'm sure they follow the market close enough to see this series competes with their own EVO (and loses hands-down).
> The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price.
Yet this makes the QVO more attractive for you, especially considering it doesn't even feature a 500 GB model? I don't understand your argument. The point is this drive needs to be much, much cheaper than the EVO to be attractive at all. The downsides of the QLC NAND are numerous and significant; they need to be offset using the price. It's also clear this is where the multi-bit madness should end, because QLC is already encroaching onto the HDD territory in certain aspects (except the price, sadly) and scenarios. If PLC were a thing, I'd most likely stay away from it even if it were cheaper than hard drives. That's just asking for trouble, like those glass platters in IBM's Deskstar 75GXP (one of the most disastrous HDD series of all time).
R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>The fact that it's the first or the only doesn't matter to anyone who's buying things based on anything resembling a performance/price ratio.The fact is you quoted me when I said first of a kind, which holds true for this drive, end of!
>So why didn't Samsung recommend a lower price to begin with, considering how badly this products needs it?
I dunno, how about you ask Samsung why didn't they sell the 860 EVO for $130 at launch?
>Yet this makes the QVO more attractive for you, especially considering it doesn't even feature a 500 GB model?
Yes because the QVO model, when it launches here, should be cheaper ($/GB) than the EVO drives. It's not like I can't afford $130 drive, but the 1TB or 2TB would be better VFM for me, considering I'm looking to replace some HDDs permanently. The EVOs would probably still be 40~60% more expensive.
moozooh - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
> The fact is you quoted me when I said first of a kind, which holds true for this drive, end of!Once again, the fact that I'm pointing out is that it is a non-argument. Early adopter premium only exists for something that such an early adopter would want to have NO MATTER THE COST. Such as a new feature or better performance with existing features. Here, the cost is the ONLY thing an early adopter would want about it and the only potential advantage, period. Why do you not see how you're not making sense? "One of a kind" is an idiotic argument to use for the product that's intended to be cheaper, not better.
> I dunno, how about you ask Samsung why didn't they sell the 860 EVO for $130 at launch?
They launched the 860 EVO at the same time with the 860 Pro with a significant enough difference in MSRP that one didn't cannibalize the other, and the EVO was also fast enough to overtake most of the competition widely available at that price point. So the pricing made sense at the time, not so much here.
> The EVOs would probably still be 40~60% more expensive.
Hopefully so, but Samsung's lack of aggression and insight in undercutting their own existing product is disappointing. They are well aware of the going price of the EVO.
R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>moozoohWe're forgetting arguably the most important thing ~ yields. There were some (unconfirmed) reports that QLC yields were below par, so it's quite possible that these products being priced so close to TLC drives is a result of that.
moozooh - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
I don't really think yields are important. It's not an attribute for customer to base their decisions on, it's not something that can be tested or seen, and needn't be either—it's the manufacturer's problem. After all, customers aren't altruists and aren't out there to help Samsung or any other vendor do their business—what they need to care about is that the products they buy are priced fairly. Samsung won't convince anyone to overpay for QLC because the yields are too low to justify a fair price.Two possible ways to handle this launch better would be either to bite the bullet and suggest a sensible MSRP from the get go or stabilize the technology before coming out with the product and selling it at a healthy margin. Either way there won't be many people buying this until it's sufficiently cheap so the difference isn't as big as it might feel.
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
'Yields don't matter to initial consumer product pricing' is a pretty spicy take.It doesn't matter whether the consumers want to be altruistic (definitely not the correct usage here), this is the price if you want high density SSD storage in a single unit, like it or not. You clearly don't, so kindly shut up and move on.
Manch - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
If the 500GB EVO is double the going price in your area, what makes you think the 860 QVO won't be?Me thinks, you've dug a hole. Stop digging LOL
R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>double the going priceDouble the what? Do you know the price 860 EVO debuted in every country of the world, now can you guess the price QVO would retail for?
How about you stop assuming $130 US (1TB) is the normal EVO price everywhere around the world? Then stop reaching.
s.yu - Saturday, December 1, 2018 - link
If you're knowingly buying from an expensive source, you're buying it wrong. If you insist on buying it wrong, then stop wasting other people's time with your BS.Time to hit eBay, nowadays Taobao may help.
Santoval - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
"Right now there is exactly zero reason to choose it over the EVO. The 500GB EVO costs about $130 US where I'm from, there's very little incentive for me to buy it given the "inflated" price."Assuming the 500GB EVO actually costs as much as the 1TB EVO in your country (I'm frankly skeptical about this, but let's take you at your word) what makes you thing that the 1TB QVO will not in turn cost as much as the 2TB QVO?
Are you seriously suggesting that your country's taxmen or tariffmen are going to place much lower taxes/tariffs on QLC based SSDs than one TLC based SSDs?
Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Import the 1TB from Amazon, you can do that to any south american country.Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Even at 25% cheaper than an EVO it would barely beat the (current) best sale price of other mainstream TLC SSD... And TLC is probably not going away any time soon. I'd love to see the price gap reach 25%+ sooner rather than later tho.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
It may be that companies are hoping for higher margin. It is not impossible for that to happen. CDs, for example, were a higher margin product than the LPs they replaced.If supply of TLC shrinks, as companies move to QLC production, the competition between TLC and QLC also shrinks, making room, potentially, for more margin.
Amandtec - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
The yields are poor at the moment so there is no point selling them low. It has a big effect on your share price if you release new game changing technology like QLC to market, because shareholders are sophisticated and understand the long term term strategy here.moozooh - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
> The yields are poor at the moment so there is no point selling them low.I think you misunderstand: there's no point *buying them high*. The only point of these drives is buying them low. So not selling them low means *not selling them*, period.
Customers may not be shareholders, but they aren't idiots, either. They understand QLC is a step down in almost every aspect of the drive's operation. It's an inferior product, and the price needs to reflect that for it to be considered for purchase.
jjj - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Actually , R&D is surprisingly low compared to the revenue generated and, aside from that, they might be close enough to 5 cents per GB production costs now for QLC so if there is a global economic crash caused by Trump and his tariffs, we could see 50$ per TB in half a year from now.Otherwise, could be 2020-2021 for that kind of price, especially if China manages to ramp output.
NAND prices are down a bit from peak but folks still have 40-50% overall NAND margins,there is room for much lower prices and production costs decline 15-25% per year.
R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>they might be close enough to 5 cents per GB production costs now for QLCSure but that's at least 6~12 months away from now. So how can anyone realistically expect Samsung to debut the QVO at such prices given there's no competition (SATA QLC) nor any reason for Samsung to not make hay while the sun shines? For anyone who says the $130 US for 1TB EVO is the normal price, it's not in the ROTW.
sonny73n - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
“Yeah no one's selling you 8TB for $400 anytime soon. Aside from the fact that the R&D costs for QLC need to be recuperated first & companies need to reinvest an increasing amount for future development, there's also a point after which it doesn't make sense for the SSD, or NAND, maker to sell these at a loss.If you really want something that big, for dirt cheap, try spinners instead.”
You sound like a Samsung shill. If HDD manufacturers decide to keep on R&D for those spinners, are you willing to pay extra for their future development? Beside, SSD tech has been around for a decade, now it costs less to make an SSD than to make an HDD for the same capacity.
R0H1T - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
>You sound like a Samsung shill.Oh sure let's all forget the aftermath of the Thai floods ~ insane prices, insane quality (as in really bad) w/warranties as low as just a year long! So while the HDD makers sat on their collective behind, much like Intel, the SSD makers out paced them, out innovated(?) them & could make spinners virtually obsolete, except bottom of the barrel 5400/5900 rpm drives especially in $/GB.
So let's see, arguing for higher prices because R&D is an ever increasing (one time) cost that needs to be recuperated, is shilling now? Do you also want me to feel sad because vacuum tubes are dead or that NAND prices will continue to fall, in the foreseeable future?
boozed - Sunday, March 24, 2019 - link
RecoupedFunBunny2 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
"moving off of spinning rust and onto SSDs with my bulk storage. "well... cold storage of NAND ain't all that hot even at SLC. at QLC? not up to bulk storage, if you ask me. and, no, you didn't.
0ldman79 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Bulk storage on the PC, not offline storage.I could use a big SSD myself, but at this price I'm better off picking up an EVO or WD 3D NAND instead.
I'm sure it will drop in a couple of months and we may even see the 1TB hit the $99 mark. Samsung QLC is looking pretty decent, overall endurance isn't much worse than my WD Blue 1TB 3D NAND, though smaller capacities drop off horribly.
azazel1024 - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
What conditions? SLC lasts a LONGGGgggggg time powered off. Decades.MLC on a lightly used drive is also years and years. TLC is also measured in years on a lightly used drive under the right conditions.
Yes, an abused TLC drive today, left in a hot car in the summer time is going to start getting corrupt bits in a matter of a few weeks. That isn't most people's use case and for bulk storage, TLC at least kept vaguely room temperature has a storage life of something >1yr even when pushing up near the P/E endurance of the drive. I forget what JEDEC calls for (or whoever the standards body is), but the P/E endurance on TLC IIRC is 9 months at room temperature. IE your drive should typically not lose any stored bits when at room temperature and powered off for 9 months once you have exhausted your P/E endurance (obviously going past it reduces the powered off endurance as well as the potential for other things, like blocks not being able to be written to due to high power requirements or not being able to differentiate voltages, etc.)
I don't know what the endurance on QLC is supposed to be, but IIRC it is still measured in multiple months at the limit of P/E endurance (and typically when new the cold/off endurance of a drive is several times longer than when it is at the end of its life). I wouldn't want to use QLC, TLC or even MLC or SLC as archival storage that is supposed to last decades, but HDDs could be problematic for decadal storage also.
Araemo - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Honestly? Give me a 4TB for $300 and I start getting tempted. I have an array of 4 3TB spinning rust (5900 RPM even) disks I would love to upgrade to SSDs and at least a moderate size increase. I'd prefer 6TB or 8TB disks, so I can double the array size, but 4TB at a reasonable price gets tempting.Spunjji - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Wait. Just wait. Every time the capacity goes up and the price goes down, another poster comes along with a new higher capacity they want at a new lower price. You'll get it one day but right now it's physically impossible.rpg1966 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Ha, I came here to say this. These guys would (supposedly) have jumped at these capacity/price/speed/endurance combinations a year ago, but now, oh no, they're way too expensive. It's a wonder they ever buy anything at all...azazel1024 - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
My limit has always been spending $600-800 to replace the storage in my desktop and server. Right now I am utilizing 3.5TiB of the 5.4TiB capacity of my 2x3TB RAID0 arrays. Now that has been creeping up. 12 months ago it was probably 2.8-2.9TiB utilized. At any rate, I need enough performance (minimum 250MB/sec sustained large transfers once SLC cache is exhausted, or if below, it better be very close to that figure) to not need feel the need to make a RAID array so I can run JBOD and add disks as my storage pool gets utilized so they don't need to all be matching drives.4TB would maybe just barely cut it, but it also likely wouldn't leave me enough growth room as I'd be running out to add probably 2TB disks in a few months. 5-6TB would probably be enough to last me 18-24 months before I'd need to add any disks.
Anyway, so you are talking 10TB of total storage (minimum) for no more than about $800. My song hasn't changed on that in the last couple of years. We still aren't there. Though getting close. 8 cents a GB isn't THAT far away. And by the time we get there, my needs might have only creeped up to 12TB for the same no more than $800 (and who knows, maybe in a couple more years I could gin up another $100 or $200 to get it, even if prices haven't gotten down to 6-7 cents a GB).
So if I was looking at 3x2TB drives in JBOD and could just add another 2TB disk to it as my storage got filled up for a measly ~$350 between both machines every couple of years (and hopefully getting cheaper each time I did it, or it is cheaper enough when I need more capacity a couple years after building the SSD storage pools to get a new 4TB disk for each machine or something).
One of the things I don't like have HDDs and RAID (well it would be the same with SSDs and RAID) is really needing matching drives. So if my storage runs low, it means replacing entire arrays instead of just adding a new disk to provide the extra capacity, but being able to keep both higher performance and keeping a unified volume.
Right now my minimum HDD standard once I start hitting capacity/performance limits is probably going to be getting a set of Seagate Barracuda Pro drives for the performance of 7200rpm spindle speeds. That means 2x2x4TB drives (so 4 drives total) which is around $600 right now, and only gets me 1/3rd more capacity...
In other words I'd likely need to replace both arrays again maybe 3 years later (at most). Going to 2x2x6TB drives might make longer term financial sense, but it also has a startup cost of around $1000.
Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
It'll probably take several years for prices to get to that point... Optimistically.Spunjji - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
"They are trying to milk saps"There's no evidence whatsoever for that claim. TLC drives weren't cheaper than MLC when they started out, now they (mostly) are - it's how product introductions work. The same will happen here. Enough of the bleating and moving of goalposts to ridiculous locations already.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Yeah the premise was cheaper NAND for bulk storage with compromises. That way all okay in my mind. But as shown, there's just no good value proposition here yet. Just inherently I figured QLC would be 33% cheaper than TLC and then mass production and the higher density stacking would bring that down further. But...I guess not.nagi603 - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
At $400 I'd toss out all the current HDDs of my NAS. Maybe in a few years.... or not, as the HDD prices/capacities move too.azazel1024 - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
My price point is roughly 8 cents a GB and performance of at least 250MB/sec sustained writes/reads.Which these aren't at. That might mean a few more generations of TLC drives to get there. I don't know. My use case is replacing the spinning rust in my desktop and server. I mirror storage between them and I am running dual 1GbE interfaces with SMB Multichannel. So I can push about 235MB/sec across.
Sometimes I am just shoving a few GB file (sometimes one or two single digit MB sized files, but more often larger ones). On rare occasions I am backing up completely from one machine to the other, because reasons. So when tossing 2-3TB of data, I don't need my transfer "stalling" at 80MB/sec, or even 160MB/sec. Hopefully soon networking prices on 2.5/5/10GbE will drop enough I will upgrade there. I don't necessarily need to saturate a 2.5GbE, let alone 5 or 10GbE interface with big transfers.
So my benchmark is 250MB/sec sustained on full disk transfers. That way I don't need to set up drives in RAID to accommodate higher speeds. As one of things I am looking forward to/hoping for with SSDs is being able to move to storage pools/JBOD type setup so that as I start pushing my capacity limits, I can just add a new drive, rather than needing to replace an entire array. And those sustained speeds better be able to manage that with the disk 80-90% full. One of those things that makes me shy away from using HDD arrays that full is the performance suffers a lot once you start getting that far in on the tracks (my current 2x3TB RAID0 arrays can push about 320MB/sec when on the outer tracks, on the inner ones it is only about 190MB/sec).
Once of these days I could justify dishing out $600-800 to replace my 2x3TB arrays with 5-6TB of storage in each machine. Especially if it is storage that I can potentially keep using for a long time (I don't know, call it a decade or so) by just adding a new disk once capacity starts getting low, rather than replacing all of them. But I need/want good performance while I am at it.
For my server I can still comfortably live with a 60GB system drive. When I upgrade it, I will likely FINALLY replace the old SATAII SSD in there with a newer SATAIII 120GB SSD or get an M.2 120GB depending on what the board will support. Basically the smallest capacity I can get. It doesn't need heaps of performance. My desktop I will likely get a 500GB M.2 TLC drive once I finally upgrade it (currently running a last generation 256GB TLC SATAIII drive as the system disk).There I'd like some nice performance, but frankly a good M.2 TLC drive with 512GB is big enough jump in performance I don't care to spend the money on an MLC drive for the system disk.
TheCurve - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Another great review from Billy. Love reading your stuff!rocky12345 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
This is great and a step closer to getting rid of spinning drives but they are not there yet. The prices of these Samsung drives are far better at the 4TB range but I just picked up a 4TB WD Blue for $99 Canadian on the black Friday sales granted that same drive before the sale was $209.99 Canadian but even still far cheaper than the $599.99US for the Samsung 4TB almost SSD drive.With all of that said I am very happy to see large TB drives for SSD coming into a lower price range probably going to be another 5-6 years before the prices match for spinning and SSD drives or if Seagate and WD totally stop making spinning drives then of coarse we have nothing to fall back on if we want large TB hard drives in our systems for data storage and we will have to pay the price of these types of SSD drives.
On a side note my fear is that when Seagate and WD stop making spinning drives SSD drive prices might sky rocket because we have no other option. The only reason SSD drives are coming down in the larger sizes is these companies are trying to compete with large TB spinning drives on price points.
kpb321 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I'm not sure SSD's will ever pass up HD's for $ per GB for pure bulk storage. Even the "Cheap" 4tb SSD is around the cost of 2x 10 TB HDs so somewhere around 5X more expensive in $ per GB. Not an impossible margin but still a lot of ground to make up vs a moving target. What has happened is SSDs have gotten "big enough" and "cheap enough" that for many people they are viable as the only drive in their machine. Looking at Newegg it's ~$45 for your basic 1tb hd and you can pick up a cheap ~250gb SSD for a little less or a ~512gb SSD for a little more. I'd certainly prefer a 250 or 512 gb SSD as the drive in my system over a 1tb HD but if you do need bulk storage (1tb+) HDs are still hard to beat. 3TB hd's start off at ~$85 and continue to be more cost effect at higher sizes so I don't think HDs will completely vanish. They may become increasingly specialized to bulk storage and cloud providers with things like SMR trading off some performance for increased density but I doubt they will go away. Cheap PC mfgs do still seem to like the cheap 1tb hds. About the same cost as a small but usable SSD but give big numbers for the ads.dontlistentome - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
It's about 10 years ago that I bought an Intel 80GB drive for $250. We're getting 2TB flash for that now - about a factor of 25 times reduction in price.Another 5 times cheaper? Easy.
DanNeely - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
For comparison, in 2008 the biggest HDDs were apparently 1.5TB in size; that drive launched at ~$215 (although it rapidly dropped afterward). For comparison a 14TB Ironwolf is $530 at B&H. That's 9.3x more capacity at at 2.4x the price; or roughly at 3.8x improvement in price per TB at the top end. Or only 2.7x is you use the ~$150 price estimated price for nov 08.Flash might end up needing to drop 10x in price per TB to beat spinning rust; but it has momentum behind it, and the more market share it wins based on size/power/performance the more economies of scale and larger R&D budgets will tilt the floor in its favor.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-terabyte-...
https://camelcamelcamel.com/Seagate-Barracuda-7200...
Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Ever heard of law of diminishing returns?At 1st tech is hard to produce and sell than it scales till you reach a wall, same with flash cards at the times of N64, 32-64MB for $100.
Even HDD's which a well known tech is having a hard time executing the next step, HAMR which should boost capacities to 20-50TB, 4 years of delay.
The_Assimilator - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Just like HDDs never passed tapes in cost/GB for bulk storage.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
HDD's sweet spot for manufacturers is the 4TB and up, they can't really make them cheaper than $40-50 no matter the size, it got tons of physical moving parts, a big chunk of well crafted aluminum, special sealing, etc vs an SSD that is just nand and a plastic casing before at least you got a thin aluminum case.Glaurung - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Spinning drives aren't going away - capacities are still going up and spinning drives are still the best deal for extremely high capacity storage - like NAS and datacentre storage. That's unlikely to change any time soon. But the amount of storage that you're realistically going to want inside your computer? It's now affordable to go all SSD for your local internal storage.But storage inside your laptop has until now been a case of needing two drives, a fast SSD to boot off of and a slow HDD for your data. Or else pay a ton for a high capacity SSD, or make do with a small drive
Dr. Swag - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Selling an inferior SSD to the 860 evo for more! What a great ideaPaoDeTech - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Lower cost (QLC) higher capacity SSDs are very welcome. Is as simple as that. I read an interesting study that basically concludes that an SSD lifespan is usually limited by age not total writes. Interesting. Can anybody confirm or deny?hojnikb - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Not really. SSDs don't tend to die of old age or exhausted endurance (not in client workloads anyway) but rather random controller faulires and firmwar bugs.One considuration with such flash is data retention. As these are fairly large drives, they will be used for storage and hence this can become an issue.
PaoDeTech - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Here's the article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-t...hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Quickly skimming the article, it does seem to suggest, that age has an effect on raw bit errors. What it doesn't include (not that i can find) is wheter drives were the same model and manufacturer.Older drives could be of inferior controllers and weaker firmware design which can't cope with bit errors as well.
spkay31 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Personally I think the Intel 660p NVMe SSD's offer a very nice price performance tradeoff when on sale. Yesterday an Intel 660p 1TB drive was on sale for $130. At around 1800Mbps it's ~ 3.5X faster than a SATA ssd and about 45% cheaper than a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVMe drive. OK, so it's 1800Mbps vs 3200Mbps but again for my uses that is certainly excellent speed improvement from a SATA ssd and I'm willing to accept some of the other shortcomings of QLC. My experience is that QLC is already a very reasonable value proposition for many applications.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
While I have nothing against the Intel 660p, not QLC, and I very much welcome these technologies, even considering black friday """deals""", I still don't think it has become price competitive (yet).I purchased an 860 EVO 1TB for $127 ($127 after tax/shipping), and then later an MX500 2TB for $209 ($229 after tax/shipping). (Bought the 860 EVO 1TB since the 2TB was $299 and therefore much more expensive in $/GB, and because I hadn't seen anything better by the time it was Saturday, but CyberMonday on Amazon brought the $209 MX500. I may or may not return the 860 EVO.)
Both of these drives are 3D TLC based, and still have their marginal sustained read/write advantages over 3D QLC. Given the (roughly) equivalent price between a 1TB 860 EVO 1TB and Intel 660p 1TB, I don't think it's unfair to say that the 860 EVO should be every customer's pick every single time (again, given these """deal""" prices).
As always, it'll take some time before newer technologies drop in prices and mature in overall value. I'm sure it'll happen for QLC drives, as they did with MLC and TLC before them, but it just hasn't happened quite yet.
Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Wait what? The 2TB MX500 hit $209 this year? Was it a flash sale or something? I had price alerts set on it, the 860 EVO, and the WD Blue/SanDisk Ultra and the cheapest I saw for a 2TB was $255... Granted I was mostly looking at Amazon, where'd you score that deal?Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Bleh, googling revealed that WAS on Amazon... It never triggered my price alerts, hrm, even tho it's definitely showing on Camelcamel's price history now, weird. Maybe I glossed over it entirely, oh well.The_Assimilator - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
https://www.pcgamer.com/crucials-2tb-mx500-ssd-is-...hojnikb - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
@BillyCan you do a data retention test ? Like writing the drive with data (H2testw seems to be the pick of the bunch) and disconnecting it. I'm interested how data retention holds up over time.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Don't use SSDs for cold storage. Testing this is absurdly stupid and a waste of a reviewers time.Disconnect drive for 10 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
Disconnect drive for 15 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
Disconnect drive for 20 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
(We're already at 45 days, or 1.5 months, and chances are the data's still all there, are you getting how and why this kind of testing is stupid?)
By the time you get to sufficiently long enough time periods to see some change in data you'd have wasted over a year trying to find a time period (within 5 days) where you know the drive will start losing data. This is just as absurd as asking reviewers to test NAND flash endurance by hammering the drive 24/7 for years until it dies. By the time it DOES die something better will have already arrived on the market. And disregarding all that, testing with a sample size of ONE is not indicative of any relevant performance characteristics for your ONE drive.
If you want to use cold storage backups, either use a mechanical hard drive, a tape drive, or invest in cloud storage and encrypt your data before uploading it.
Testing the cold storage capabilities of a sample size of ONE QLC SSD does nothing but prove that it's a less satisfactory use case for the technology than using a mechanical hard drive.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I _think_ you can find Google or Facebook statistics on their SSDs, error rate etc. in representative volumes. But ofc it is enterprise grade hardware.hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Not for QLC.hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
You're not thinking very far. As QLC is very cheap, it will be used in likes of flash drives, SD cards and portable SSDs. With these, it's not expected for them to be powerred at all time and in the case of sd cards and flash drives, it's not likely controller would do any kind of data rewritting.So this is very much a relavant test, that might give us ideas on how it performs. And no, you don't have to wait a year to see something; data curruption can be presented a lot sooner if from of read error and slower read speed in general. A more extreme approach is to heat the drive, which accelarates the process.
eddieobscurant - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Horrible performance by samsung 64 layer qlc nand. Way slower than intel's/micron's . Especially the 4k random reads are slower than my first ssd 10 years ago, the intel x-25m.In order for samsung 860 qvo to make sense, it should be priced below 0.10$/gb
stargazera5 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Great, now that we have QLC down, we can move on to PLC (5 bits per cell) and 1 drive write per week.CheapSushi - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
And from the current trend, it still won't be much cheaper. =Pnathanddrews - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Still leaps and bounds beyond 7200RPM hard drives, but not great either. If we could just get to SATA3 equivalent performance at this price/GB, it would be great. 4TB for that cheap is pretty awesome though, I might grab one if it goes on sale.Makaveli - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Your review conclusion was much easier on this drive than the Tech Report review.Basically buy a 860Evo this drive is trash is what I get when I read all the reviews on the net today. Only people that don't follow the industry will be suckered into buying these because of that attractive low price.
Like everything in this world you get what you pay for.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I didn't want to over-emphasize the price issue because I don't think that situation will last very long. Samsung may end up dropping prices before the QVO even hits the shelves, and within a few months I think it will be significantly cheaper than the EVO, which means it should also be cheaper than all the other mainstream TLC drives and the handful of high-capacity DRAMless TLC drives. Once the novelty wears off and the pricing settles down, I fully expect the QVO to end up being a very reasonable entry-level buy.hanselltc - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It'll not only have to be significantly cheaper than the EVO series -- I think it'll have to compete with HDD arrays.The_Assimilator - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
This sort of forward-thinking bigger-picture non-knee-jerk reviewing is why I keep coming back to AnandTech. People can pan this drive and QLC all they want, but Samsung's gonna be laughing all the way to the bank once QLC starts eating HDDs' lunch, and then those same sites that trashed them will be calling them visionary.BTW Billy, please do keep us updated on the 4TB failures you saw - since that capacity is likely going to be the best in terms of cost/GB, a lot of people will be considering 4TB Samsung SSDs, and if there is a controller/firmware/NAND issue lurking it would be great to know about it beforehand.
AbRASiON - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Hi,I know it's an odd request but I don't follow reviews as much as I used to.
I'd love to see a couple of graphs on this chart, just showing perhaps a very early generation SSD or even a regular high end 7200RPM hard drive.
Scale is all but lost when you don't recognise the disks it's comparing against.
I know the 860/960 Evos are powerful, I can see this disk is much slower, but will it totally destroy a hard drive or Intel G2 160GB classic in all benchmarks? Etc
TekWiz - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Well sure it will destroy a hard drive! It's slower than the EVO but still is a pretty good SSD. It's aimed at people who want high capacity for as least money as possible. I bet if the list price is $150, it will probably end up costing about $20 less than an equivalent EVO.It's like comparing the PRO to the EVO, it's more expensive but has higher performance. But any of these quality SSD totally beat spinning disks particularly when it's not just sequential reads. In normal use, sequential reads are less common than the arm of the drive going back and forth over the surface reading blocks from all over the place, and you can hear it like a chattering sound, sometimes annoying. Those reads slow the drive down to a crawl usually. That's what makes the SSD so superior, there is no waste of time while a mechanical arm positions itself repetitively over various blocks on a spinning surface. On an SSD all the data is equally instantly available no matter where it exists in the cell matrix in the chips...
hanselltc - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Why would I want these over a HDD though? Say, a SSHD.CheapSushi - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Honestly I'd like for SSHDs to get a reboot, especially with this higher capacity QLC that also acts like SLC when needed. The current SSHDs I think have a max of 8GB of NAND and 2TB (I think) of platter. I'd love to see maybe 128GB of NAND and 4TB or 5TB of platter, at least for 2.5" form factor.Darcey R. Epperly - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
And a reserved area guaranteed to be NAND, the rest for caching.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
SSHD's shoudl use optane, like 32GB.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
And let you manually mirror files that you want accelerated.h0007h - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It's even slower than HDD。 Why not buy a regular HDD with an Optane? That's much cheaper.piroroadkill - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It seems to me like the move from TLC to QLC is not just a bit worse, but monumentally so. QLC would have to be a LOT cheaper than TLC to warrant a purchase, not just a bit.piroroadkill - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
"The current street prices for the 860 EVO are lower than the 860 QVO for two out of three capacities, and that's comparing against one of the best SATA SSDs out there."Which makes QLC as a worthless product. I don't think 25% off the cheapest TLC SSDs would be enough, because it seems even worse than that.
rpg1966 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Right, because these at-introduction prices will never fall, just like with every other product in the history of the universe.Kamgusta - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
CONCLUSIONS: Current QLC drives are trash.vortmax2 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
In the end, it's good to see this quad tech coming to the consumers. We're now within striking distance for true HDD to SSD storage/mirror conversion. In the next year or two, pricing will lower enough for many to make the leap.nwarawa - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
YES! Finally! Samsung GETS it! 512GB QLC models should not exist. Even 512GB models with current 3D TLC don't reach the parallelism performance sweet spot. The 2TB model, when priced right, should all but eliminate the case for consumer 2.5in HDDs.Kaihekoa - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Pretty underwhelming performance and too expensive. I'd buy at 10 centers/GB.Morawka - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
I just had 2 Samsung QLC 3 bit drives die this year alone. They were less than 1.5 year old. I'm never buying Samsung's EVO line again. It will be Pro from here on out. 4 bit drives will fail even faster.Makaveli - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Which model evo's were those Morawka?And how many writes did they see? what kind of environment did you have them in?
stephenbrooks - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
I was starting to get excited about 2TB for $300 but then I looked up 2TB HDDs and they're about $60. Still a huge price differential especially as I usually want at least one extra drive for nightly backups, although perhaps the backup drive could be the HDD?Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Even with the right capacities for a QLC price is similar or worse than current TLC.Samsunf 860 EVO 1TB $127
For QLC to make sense it should HALF of a TLC else is a ripoff.
s.yu - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
What's the point of trying to pronounce it? It's just Q-V-O!araczynski - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
so basically next black friday these should be half price and the 4tb might be worthy of consideration as a Steam drive.thomas-hrb - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
$149.99 launch price is encouraging even if it is currently more than the 860evo. The 860evo launched for over $300 (closer to $330) and is now $139. If the qvo follows this pattern we can look forward to sub $65 for the 1tb qvo and maybe even $250 for 4tb.Ankou - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
I think these QLC drives are a bad idea especially in the way they're being marketed. I'm not even talking about performance, the speed reduction I could live with. However, they're orders of magnitude worse in P/E cycles, retention, and endurance. These manufacturers know this and they're preying on the lack of education and focusing on price. Even so far as advertising these drives (this one in particular) as using 4 bit MLC memory (which 4 bit MLC is *always* QLC) implying that it is on safer MLC memory:https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronic...
That is completely a scummy marketing/PR way of doing business.
s.yu - Saturday, December 1, 2018 - link
The fundamental issue is that 2-bit MLC should have been accurately named DLC in the first place, it's not like somebody's gonna mix that up with downloadable content.0ldman79 - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
Could we get some numbers from some mechanical drives, WD or Seagate 1TB or 2TB, in comparison to the slower QLC drives?I'd like to see how they hold up against the QLC in random and sustained reads/writes. The latency might be the deciding factor even though I've got some mechanical drives that can beat them on sustained reads/writes.
0ldman79 - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
I found some answers to that question on the Bench.https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2339?vs=22...
Load time, file copy times, etc, I guess more day to day testing would be appreciated. The spinner does a decent job on the BAPCo tests.
I'm wondering if the QLC will really improve my load times vs my 2TB mechanical drive that sustains nearly 200MBps read speeds in practice.
ewitte - Thursday, March 28, 2019 - link
Who in their right mind would purchase a QVO drive when the EVO is similarly priced? These drives perform poorly and have horrible longevity. 160MB/s writes after the cache!!!! I will not even touch the smaller EVO drives because the write speed is so low (500GB is ok but 1TB is so affordable now it is my minimum).Sanmayce - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
Anand, please consider debunking the myth of data retention being limited to a few months.Really, where this myth originates from, f.e. if one buys QVO for backups what is the safe-time-between-losing-data?
My proposal is to fill the drive with 900GB 7z archive and test the integrity after, say, 6 months.
I myself am planning to buy the 1TB QVO just to find how durable it is under superheavy REAL-WORLD random read/writes - QD1. By the way, you are using 16GB spans in your tests, but the SLC is bigger than that, don't you see a problem?
bobhumplick - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
so if the intel 660p and the smasung qvo are the same price which one do you get?praveenvj - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link
Now that price has dropped to $400 for 4TB, does this make sense compared to EVO for daily driver PC?southleft - Monday, August 19, 2019 - link
Here we are about 9 months later - August 2019 - and the price of Intel's 660p 1TB model has dropped by 50% when it's on sale. So, for $85 - $95 you can get an NVMe drive with, say, 750GB of usable capacity and it will blow all of these SATA SSDs out of the water. In other words, if you don't fill the drive over about 75% full you'll have a smokin' fast rig.problemchild - Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - link
As a professional many comments here disregard what these drives are intended for and for obvius reasons you wouldn't want to buy them for a server array or high availability applications. Samsung has entered a product which is now competing with lower priced product \ brands. For the average consumer looking for a Samsung branded drive to be used as a basic storage drive for documents, photos, music and game storage it makes a lot of sense. Admittedly IMHO buying a 2TB SSD for general storage use at the $200 mark is extreme in comparison to $80 for a spinner but for some users but for gamers it may be worth the price to use as game storage drive.Scour - Sunday, June 28, 2020 - link
Question: If the SLC-cache is full, the speed drops, that´s clear. But what happened if the SSD have a power loss directly after the data-writing ends? Is all Data still accessable on the SSD (because data still have to be copied from the SLC-cache to the QLC)?leexgx - Thursday, August 6, 2020 - link
did they ever issue a firmware update with the 4TB QVO, EVO and Pro samsung ssds been problematic sometimes not working