News Samsung unveils 860 QVO 4-bit MLC SATA SSDs

They lost me at SATA.
If I was wanting value, I'd still go for a HDD. If I want performance, a SATA SSD isn't going to cut it. Until large SSD's drop to only marginally more than large HDD prices, then they're not really worth it for me.
Maybe for some people, but not for me.

 

yea large ssds are not really competitive enough on pricing for me to warrant buying one at the moment

i have 3 x 120gb ssds in raid 0 for boot/games then a 2tb hdd for storage. but i use one drive or my server for storage

 

The thing is, SSD capacities are going up, but their durability is going down. I would rather have a massive HDD for long term storage, than a massive SSD. That's just because I know that my HDD could still be working in 10+ years, no such chance with an SSD. How often will you need to move and update your storage with SSD's?

 

QLC is a major step backwards for durability and a minor step backwards for speeds in the long run as well. Why do people get blinded by cheap "bigger is always better" advertisement? It's not dicks they're selling here!

 

The 1TB drive looks poor compared to the 1TB 970 Pro I bought a few months ago, 360TBW vs 1200TB.

 

Thanks, Gareth. My thoughts exactly...

 

Hmmm... TBH I hadn't thought about that.

 

Maybe not, but the 1TB 860 evo is £170, and has a 5 year/600TBW warranty. Currently on OCUK for £140. So I'd still say it's not really progressing much.

 

Yea it's still an improvement. I suppose it depends on what the 'usual' price of the drive is. Be nice if it starts to force the rust-drives down in price too, but a 1TB WD black is ~£70 so not sure it will.

 

But you have to admit that it's not a purely good development right here. We have cheaper SSDs (good) that are closer than ever before to competing with HDDs on a price/TB ratio (very good) while offering most of the benefits of solid state devices over spinning rust (good) yet progressively decrease on durability (SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC --- not good) without that last fact being properly addressed in the mainstream reviews, thus leaving customers blind to it unless they are reading the more technical reviews (bad), which most people just don't do (very bad, but alas nothing much we can do in the short term).

 

Have you seen how much speed drops once the SLC cache has burned out(between 6gb and 42gb more fuller the drive smaller the SLC Cache) its 80MB/s on the 1tb version that's really unacceptable slower then a hdd (180mb/s on the 2tb/4tb witch is not as bad) also it take a Long time for it to empty the SLC cache out (more then 10 minutes)

And the 4tb one has issues with randomly not been detected by the system at boot up so best avoid the 4tb one for now until it's been confirmed that they're have fixed the issue

They currently cost to much at the moment (at one point the 1tb 860 evo was cheaper then the 860 qvo)

 

Somebody read Anand's review.

 

I think it is a great development for a) people on a tight budget and b) a secondary drive for anyone wanting a mITX all flash build like myself.
I missed the 970 EVO on Amazon for £89 but I know I will get a similar price soon. After that, I want a cheap 1-1TB drive for data and game installs.
A 1-2TB drive should last years, even as an OS drive for average users. For a game drive, I should be able to get aq 4-6TB drive by the time it wears out.

According to Samsung Magician, my 830 256GB has written 72.2TB with a power on time of 5.5 years.
SATA speeds are disappointing though. My guess is that they are moving away from the 2.5" form factor and this will go in many budget laptops.

 

It's a great second drive - stick your games on it. Mostly read access so wear isn't a problem, it's big enough to fit lots of games on, and it doesn't cost a fortune. Stick your os/swap/etc on a small NVME drive and you are good to go.

 

I'm to lazy to read reviews but what's its IOPS like compared to other SSD and HDD's, that's really the main advantage of an SSD after all.

 

I think write endurance is rather a paper bogeyman.
From personal lots-of-anecdotes-is-nearly-data (many thousand boxes, drive churn averaging around 2 per day) I've yet to see a failure due to NAND lifetime. Even Techreport's smaller sample but more intensive SSD endurance testing showed an old planar TLC NAND drive (less endurance than 3D NAND) lasting well outside projected lifetime. Plus there's client workloads, which probably write a lot less than people assume outside of specific applications (e.g. NAS write cache drive) where you are probably going to opt for a faster drive anyway. NAND operational idle lifetime is fine (as long as you don't go doing stupid things like slapping heatsinks on it, the controller will keep the NAND warm and periodically refresh), multi-year cold storage would be the only remaining concern solely due to lack of time to gather real-world data.
tl;dr You're more likely to see the controller fail with any sort of NAND than to reach QLC's endurance limits. If you need to store data long-term then HDD (or better, tape) is still better than NAND (and cheaper too).

 

Is offline data retention specs published? From a few papers i've read, the general consensus was that you shouldn't expect more than half a year, temperature dependent and it gets worse as nand ages. Has Samsung somehow mitigated this, o is it just a "small" thing noone talks about?