Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SSD is still extremely cheap on Amazon

[Redaktion]

The 2.5-inch SATA SSD may feature cost-effective QLC NAND, but for desktop PC users who are looking for a reasonably priced flash storage solution, the 4TB version of Samsung 870 QVO is still worth consideration at a price of 5.1 cents per gigabyte.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-870-QVO-4TB-SSD-is-still-extremely-cheap-on-Amazon.753867.0.html

[anan]

Wow. The official spec lists the flash type as 4-bit MLC. This is like technically "true". But boy they sure do want to hide the fact that it is QLC.
Guess QLC just has a bad rap at this point even though all the tests and live data show that it exceeds lifespan specifications.

[Junior]

It may be cheap but the higher the storage capacity the less life cycles it has. There is SLC, MLC, TLC and QLC and the best out of the 4 is SLC.

[NikoB]

The paradox is (as I have written about many times before) that the higher the storage capacity, the higher the likelihood of long-term storage of cold data. Right? And here the shortcomings of long-term data storage without cell refresh appear in all their glory (SSDs from Samsung never maintain a high level of cell charge even with constant power, tested in practice) even on 3D TLC - charge leakage even with minimal wear of 1-2% is catastrophic in 3 years.

But what will happen to QLC, especially with wear of 10%+ (when, according to scientific research, exponential collapse of storage time begins even on TLC)?

Rhetorical question...

Why might someone need the infamous QLC, with a write speed of only 50-100 MB/s outside the SLC cache and at the same time with a rapid loss of charge (and therefore read speed)?

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea of the target audience of this Samsung series and why anyone needs it when 1TB 3D TLC costs $40-45 right now...

In practice, this series is hardly suitable only as an intermediate cache for downloading large files from torrent trackers (so as not to force the mechanics of the HDD) at speeds of up to 1Gbps, which are subsequently supposed to be rewritten to the HDD for long-term storage for some reason. Well, or as a temporary cache for some other purposes where write speeds higher than 100-150 MB/s are not required. But in this case, you can take almost any Chinese with the same 5-year warranty and save even more, and with the YMTC 128L on 3D TLC, and not on QLC. So the overall reliability and brand name have practically no meaning here, except for the price.

[NikoB]

But if all manufacturers (it's strange that no one thought of this marketing ploy) made it possible for the user at the firmware level to select the operating mode of NAND chips, i.e. the ability to format them in TLC or MLC or even in SLC mode, then this would immediately change everything in terms of the popularity of any series, even such a shameful one.

4TB QLC = 1TB SLC, right? If the buyer can format it low-level, in SLC mode, the read and write speeds will be stable - maximum SATA3, right? And the storage time will immediately increase by orders of magnitude, as will the number of cycles (SLC has up to 100k cycles), right?

Why doesn't anyone sell SLC drives today, given how cheap SSDs are, and why doesn't anyone make it possible, at the firmware level, to format the entire drive into any mode from TLC to SLC at the buyer's discretion? In SLC mode there is no need for a cache, everything is perfect right away.

But no, they are trying to sell us SSDs only with the shameful TLC and SLC in the mass segment, although the buyer must decide for himself what is more important to him and what capacity he needs.

Try to buy a 1TB SLC drive on the global market for the indicated price of 4TB QLC Samsung...what doesn't work? Don't you think this is strange? What is the direct conspiracy of SSD drive manufacturers?