Samsung starts mass producing high-performance 4TB QLC SSDs for consumers

@digiart
Lol, ikr.

4tb for 100 ssd .....thats is a long nap

They make them at $20-30 max as per material cost. They could set price at $100
but they don't if they can sell them at whatever price is now, over $1000.

making up costs out of thin air leads to interesting opinions, but just that.

@milkod2001
Yes, that is just my guess based on what is inside of SSD. Mostly plastic, pcb, memory modules and some other components. The most expensive one would be memory modules. Samsung makes them all in house at the cost of peanuts at very high volumes. m2. SSD types have even less materials. We pay premium because this is the latest tech, gives us much better performance than old 3.5'' mechanical HDD but the cost of making SSD must be really, really small.
I have no data to back this up , this is something Samsung obviously keeps strictly for itself but i believe that based on what is inside of SSD the real cost for high volume 4TB SSD cannot be bigger than $30.

I think if they sold them so inexpensively then they wouldn't be able to make enough of them to meet demand, so they would be sold out everywhere because stock would be held back to drive the prices up even higher, then the miners would buy up all of them, and regular users would-- oh wait. SSDs, right. Yeah, cheap ones would be great.

holds about one modest jpeg ar a 5 minute song ... wow

what a conversation piece it is ..

reminds me of the "fabulous nickel holder " "the problem with nickels is you never have a place to keep them".... it holds one nickle! "

SSDs are inexpensive. It's just that they'll never (in the forseeable future) be as cheap per gig as hard drives will. Google and Facebook will continue to use platters. But consumers can get a 1tb drive for less than $200.

Don’t worry about it.

Both Samsung in my case, after 2 around years of use. One in a desktop, and another in a playstation. I use a number of HDDs from Samsung (for backup) and have another of their SSDs working fine (after well over 4 years) so maybe it was just a bad batch as they were purchased around the same time.

Just search 'SSD reliability google's experience' and it should bring up a ZDnet article from 2016. It's doesn't talk so much about the controller failure, but cites age as the biggest risk factor for bit errors. Hopefully, the tech has moved on, but I still backup just as much as I used to. No moving parts is better, but not infallible.

@ John, did you not read the post above yours? I can't remember the models, it was two years ago.

No urban legend being started... if there is, have a chat with Google. As you can also see, I'm not anti-Samsung either, as I've continued to use their storage.

I'm merely pointing out that such large capacity devices can store a lot of (potentially) irreplaceable data, and just because SSDs are on the whole more reliable, they aren't infallible. Backup in the age of SSDs and the cloud is still needed.

@John Koch
I had 3 failed SSD. All 240GB (just OS & apps) and still under warranty.

2 PNY 240G, XLR8 (the warranty replacement failed within months) Both suddenly not recognized by BIOS. No disk error was logged.

1 Intel 540s Series (240GB, M.2) . Windows kept freezing periodically I thought it was an errant windows update at first until one day it died completely. With HDD you probably could hear some 'retry' noise :).

I'm sure my situation must be unusual but 3 SSD failed while still under warranty??? All the stats about SSD read/write fatigue mean nothing here. \

I'm in the enterprise backup business but hardly took backups of my HDDs knowing it's a necessary evil. These days I make copies of my SSDs at least once a month

Atleast with hard drives you can change the circuit board over if the controller or some other electrical fault occurs, your data is still safe and retrievable in this case.

That is one advantage. However I'd give up that benefit if I could claw back another 50% greater read and write speed. All of the other TB2 drives that I have, raid and non raid, are at least double the speed of Drobo. The Drobo has become the graveyard for stuff that I do not plan on accessing a lot. tThere is also that there are a lot of 4 and 5 way raid boxes that cost less, with better performance. The only reason I got the DROBO at all was a sale at B&H. Well that and the fact that DROBO doesnt have 100 apps. It's just a drive. Qnap and Synology seem intent on turning their NAS products into SOHO servers, which are also home theater boxes, and do gaming and webcam streaming, and can make breakfast for you.

I have three NASs on my network - the DROBO, a Synology for photos, video, and music I may want to access remotely, and a single drive Western DIgital for data/files that we share in house. The DROBO has the biggest capacity and is used for backup of the other two NAS units and our PCs. The backups run automatically at night, so speed is not critical.

I use a number of external 6GB and 8GB drives.
For the machines (desktops and laptops), I use Samsung Pro 512GB SSD's (5 of them).
I do a lot of culling as well to keep the collection at a reasonable size.

Well - enjoy what you need. The rest of us will enjoy the higher capacity 4TB.

"sh10453 I use a number of external 6GB and 8GB drives.
For the machines (desktops and laptops), I use Samsung Pro 512GB SSD's (5 of them). I do a lot of culling as well to keep the collection at a reasonable size."

You either have a tiny collection of image files or a truckload of external drives.
Where do you buy your 8GB external drives?

most smartphones/tablets offer only single (removable) micro-SD cards

and many offer dual-sim slots
why not dual micro-SD slots, too?
quad ... octa, too!

heck, micro-SD is so small, one could stuff two into two SD cards, stuffed both into SD cards into a dual-SD slots on a single CF card!

obviously, multi-cards means multiple drives

if one had 8 different dcams/vcams ... such a pocket drive could handle 8 camera access on-the-go

why have one volume, when 8 are switchable as needed?
(faster than transfer via wire or wireless)

yes, but as a lot of comments below have noted, all the great rapid advancement in storage slowed down, beginning around 2013. Take that 4TB SSD from 2016 mentioned in the article above - it hasn't really changed that much in price for over two years now. In the same two year period in the 1990s, that would have halved in price, and doubled in size.

They didn't really slowed down that much... it is also a matter of necessity involved.
For some years the need of a casual user didn't really increased that much. I am still using my two 512GB HDDs that i bought almost 10 years ago, only that at that moment there were my main drives, no i use a 512GB SSD as main drive and the two HDDS in RAID0 as the main storage unit (with additional 2.5" and 3.5" as backup storage).
The need for "current" space of a home user basically didn't change much in all that time... so there is not that much of a pressure to evolve as fast nowadays.

The need, of course, exists in the corporate world, but that is not pushing the prices down too quickly or too much :)

"Do you have any idea how much a 1GB hard drive cost in 1990?"

I know - nothing. Because they were not available. At that time I remember that 40MB Hard drives were considered huge. I had one, attached to an MFM Controller.

breschdlingsgsaelz:

No, you could purchase a 1GB hard drive in 1990.

Not at a regular computer retailer though.

They cost tens of thousands of dollars, and I'm sure had to be ordered from a speciality supplier. Remember in 1990, there was no commercial activity in the internet, and there weren't even long lists of parts posted online.

Can you name Manufacturer and Model of such a drive or at least Interface and form factor? Was this for Mainframes oder Minis? For normal Workstation and Servers I don't think they were available.

I remember we had a bunch of 5 1/4" full height 1GB SCSI drives hanging off our main SPARCServer in 1995. These were not yet available at 1990.

breschdlingsgsaelz:

Sorry can't name them, I know they were made in the Boston (USA), so Route 128 area. They were very exotic, and even companies like Boeing didn't really consider them until they dropped in in price to "only" $14,000 for that 1GB hard drive.

Note if you only have light storage requirements and don't do huge installs or data transfer, then when the disk is nowhere near full performance will be ok, still at the slower end of the TLC drives, but at least in the case of the Intel NVME 660p faster than regular SATA drives. But performance falls off a cliff when the data can't fit in the SLC cache and prices are far too high to recommend it. If these Samsung drives are really much cheaper than TLC drives and you need a lot of capacity but keep it say less than 80% full they might be a good buy for non-critical data. Maybe the concerns will evaporate in time about their reliability, but you would use them yet for any serious archival data say or photos if you don't back them up.

BTW here is a link to Anandtech's review of the first QLC drive the Intel 660p
have a look at the data for empty vs full
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/3

@1Dx4me

I don't know about you but one only needs to be an amateur videographer hobbyist and with 4k 100Mbits/s codecs in many consumer tech gadgets, cameras included, you won't get far with 250GB SSD. I have 1TB SSD and if I work on more 4k projects, including creation of proxies, that 1TB is so so. And yes, you want those 4k files stored on SSD when you manipulate them for video editing.

I thought the same thing when TLC became available. But now I have a bunch of TLC drives for several years and they work just fine. Let's see how the QLC drives fare in the real world, then we can judge how crappy they are.

Time will tell if QLC is a problem or not. The endurance is unproven and if the move from 1 bit to 2 bit then 3 taught us anything the drop off in endurance is an order of magnitude less. Even then the average comuter user is going to have problems breaking that limit. However I always worry the operating system is quitely killing these things with millions of useless 4k writes.

@Vit Adamek...i think my post was very clear on using a 250GB ssd as C: drive for windows 10 and other apps, and big HDD drives for storage. this is very logical and simple ;-)

mine has room for 2 SSD HD's and 2 NVME's.

Clevo P750DM-G and no, it's basically a PC in a laptop case, including a desktop processor. it's a beast.

Dell M3800, Dell Precision 5510, 5520

awesome laptop, the Clevo. I have one myself

I don't think HDDs are going anywhere any time soon. If the manufacturers can persuade me not to buy a HDD and get an overpriced SSD just to store photos, I'm listening.

You do realize SSDs are plain horrible for long term data retention right? These newer drives built on smaller process are even worse than their forebears.

Is there a word in English for "I think the price is too high for me"?

LOL, good one.

I think I would expect entry at $400 and then drop to $300 mark after 6 months.

500 MB SSD? Ah yes, those made in 1990. lol

@BinHereBe4....Hahaha...sorry, i have fat fingers, LOL

@BinHereBe4...Hahaha..I have fat fingers...LOL.

ahhh...my fat finger again....LOL

I have owned about 10-15 HDDs and two SSDs in the past years. The only device that ever failed me was an SSD. It went dead from one day to the next with no chance whatsoever to recover the data.

I've had an equal number of SSDs and HDDs die on me in the last 10 years or so. One HDD in a work laptop that was banged around a lot, so I was really expecting that to die. One SSD died from some program in the background constantly writing logs or defragging or something when it shouldn't; and it was a crappy SSD that was only rated to 70TB. One SSD didn't die, but corrupted some part of the GPT/MBR and had to be recovered.

You are right, panther fan. But nor should anyone base their decisions on some claims on some forum with no citation of any trustworthy source.

@panther fan
And what's the successful data recovery rate for HDD vs SSD? Something vs zero? :)

That's true :)

It's really a case of whether you do something that breaks the wear levelling inside the drives. Provided you don't you're good for ages (I see I've written 57TB to my Samsung boot drive), if not you're in trouble (a burn-in program used to eat the entire life of a certain brand of SSD overnight, which as they ran it 24 hours to test the hardware killed a lot of SSDs).

@digiart
How much data is currently overwritten on your drive? There are tools to read that out and for me it is far lower than 100GB (per day).

But that aside of course your drive will not last 33 years. Not because it failed but because in 33 years the computer space will look vastly different. Just think back 33 years. That was 1985 how did computers look back then, and are you still using those hard drives?
My point was just that the drive will outlive its relevancy by a longshot

@mick232
Same here. Probably 100+ HDDs (PCs+laptops+servers ... work+home) and don't recall any sudden death HDD. With 20+ SSDs (home) 3 died within the last couple of years 2 PNY (1 + replacement) and 1 Intel M.2. Absolutely no idea why, firmware, controller, mem module???

And HDD reliability was good enough for me to just rely on backup and not configuring RAID

@Fotoni @panther fan

"I bought a 2.5" 4 TB HDD for 99€ an year ago."

"So writing an modern SSD to..."

Learn how to use the words an and a. It's really simple and takes less than a minute.

http://www.greyorgray.com/a-or-an.html

@Lan
"None of either set were mistreated." - So, how did you "kill" them?

@panther fan - remember a flash block in an SSD may only support 5,000 erase cycles. It isn't an issue as they usually use internal log-based filesystems so even if you write to a location in a block 50,000 times it actually writes to a different block each time and just remembers where what the external World sees as block 5000 (say) is stored over time. Last time I looked the production manager still had 30k worth of dead SSDs in her office with no real idea what to do with them (that was a few years ago as the firm went down the drain, alas as I was working for them at the time).
(The burn-in software just slipped through some crack in the wear-levelling algorithm. We did so much work on trying to find reliable SSDs, usually picking one and finding the next firmware update made it go 5% faster and be 50% less reliable. An example requirement was a sample of 20 drives would each boot correctly 5,000 times, with zero issues. I did pity the guy who had to keep testing drive batches.)

@ecka84: Bad luck mostly. I've managed to purchase multiple copies of a several drives which subsequently had class actions brought against their manufacturers. They were new designs at the time so that wasn't something I could know. I have also had a tendency to buy towards the bleeding edge. There's a reason they call it the bleeding edge; you tend to get cut ;)

I've learnt my lesson. Now I always buy drives that have been around a while, and I don't buy anything that's too close to the bleeding edge in technological terms. I know it sounds really obvious, but if they're pushing the limits of what they can make, well they're pushing the limits of what they can make ;)

It helps that both average performance and average capacity have jumped up massively now too. I no longer need to have the fastest available drives to get the performance levels I require.

@Lan - Must have been Seagate or Fujitsu or both :)
The average performance and capacity have jumped, but the price jumped even more. I mean, the highest capacity consumer drives cost disproportionally more and they are not too fat for an average "content creator" or any enthusiast photographer (or videographer) with a modern high resolution camera. One 12TB HDD or 3x 6TB HDDs for the same price - Tough choice? - Not at all! :) I'd take 3x6TB.

We will see, but neither the Verge link nor the Samsung link is real specific about case thickness. (I didn't check the Samsung link for a PDF data sheet.)

I was wondering why the non-pro Samsung 2TB 7mm X 2.5 inch SSD had disappeared from distribution within the USA at least. (There's the pro 2TB version, but that's $840 before sales tax last I looked.)

To be fair, they did have issues with their controller and their first TLC series in the 840 didn't they? And it took ages for a fix and I'm not sure they even issued one for the original non EVO, I think they did but it took months... It was one of the few black eyes they've had tho and AFAIK the issue didn't result in data loss, just a massive drop in performance.

Everyone else has had a serious issue at one point or another, even Intel... I would absolutely trust what Samsung rates their QLC drives for endurance-wise, but at the same time I don't currently trust that they'll price them (the 2TB particularly) any cheaper than competing TLC drives (they're still trying to charge a premium for the 860 EVO even tho the competition finally caught up).

If I can have a TLC drive for the same price as a QLC at some point in time, I'm absolutely buying the former. It'll likely take a while before QLC leads to much lower prices.