Samsung on Tuesday officially introduced its second-generation quad-level cell (QLC) drive, further pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of high-capacity consumer flash storage with a capacity of up to 8TB.
The South Korean electronics giant said consumers have traditionally had to choose between the superior performance afforded by solid state drives or the capacity advantage that you get when going with a conventional mechanical hard drive. The 870 QVO SSD, however “is able to reliably offer the best of both worlds” which Samsung claims makes it the “optimal choice for mainstream PC users who prioritize performance and value.”
The Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s, respectively. Random read / write speeds, meanwhile, are rated at up to 98K IOPS and 88K IOPS, respectively. The drives utilize the new MKX controller alongside Samsung’s 4-bit MLC V-NAND flash memory.
The 870 QVO is the successor to the 860 QVO that released in late 2018, and the inner workings of this new drive are similar. It’s a SATA 2.5-inch drive that will fit in most desktops and laptops, and it utilizes Samsung’s 4-bit multilevel cell architecture (also known as quad-level, or QLC, in this model) that helps to keep the price reasonable at the expense of faster transfer speeds.
The 870 QVO starts with 1TB at $129.99, moving up to 2TB of storage for $249.99 and $499.99 for the 4TB model. If you churn through a lot of data, you might be interested in the 8TB option that will be available in August, which is the first of this capacity Samsung has created. The price for the 8TB option isn’t public yet, though a leak on Amazon indicates it might cost $900 and release on August 24th.
