- August 2, 2018
- Posted by: mywadmin101
- Category: General
The move to 4-bit QLC chips means prices should fall considerably while Samsung is promising to maintain performance compared to its 3-bit TLC chips. It’s not just 4TB drives that will benefit from a price drop, Samsung is manufacturing 1TB and 2TB QLC SSDs, too.
If you want to go out and purchase a 4TB SSD today, Samsung will happily take your money in return for an 4TB 860 Evo. The problem is, you’ll be paying over $1,000 for one. Even halving the capacity to 2TB still means spending $500. Cheap SSDs mean settling for much lower capacities. However, those prices are set to tumble as Samsung just started mass producing 4TB QLC drives.
Much in the same way hard drive density increases over the years, so does the density of data on an SSD. Back in 2006 when SSDs were just starting to appear, the flash chips Samsung used were 70nm and stored just 4Gb allowing for a drive with 32GB of storage. By 2010 we were getting 30nm chips capable of storing 32Gb and therefore 512GB drives. The chips in use today are triple-level-cell (TLC) and store 3-bits per cell (64Gb per chip) and gave us cheaper 500GB drives while allowing for up to 4TB capacity using a lot of chips and therefore a high price.