Samsung announces production of first consumer SSD with QLC

Samsung announced mass production of the company's first 4-bit per cell V-NAND SSD for the consumer market. The drive will use Samsung's 1Tbit V-NAND and ship in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities.

The company didn't release the series name for the new QLC-enabled drive but we doubt this will fall under the 860 EVO series. Performance is said to be similar to 3-bit per cell V-NAND products thanks to TurboWrite technology that writes most data in a consumer workload to a SLC buffer.

"Samsung's new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald a massive move to terabyte-SSDs for consumers," said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president of memory sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics. "As we expand our lineup across consumer segments and to the enterprise, 4-bit terabyte-SSD products will rapidly spread throughout the entire market."

The press release gives us an indication of what to expect from the unannounced product. Samsung claims performance of up to 540 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write in sequential workloads. The series will ship with a 3-year warranty, like the 860 EVO.

Samsung is absent from Flash Memory Summit 2018 but we look forward to catching up with the company later this year at a different venue.