Samsung joins the QLC NAND party with its 860 QVO SSD

You may have noticed on black Friday and cyber Monday that prices for storage continue to drop. And now the new quad-layer-cell (QLC) tech is packing even more capacity into smaller and more affordable packages. Now, Samsung is launching its first QLC product, which could eventually push prices down even further.

The Samsung 860 QVO is a SATA-based 2.5-inch drive that comes out December 15. It comes in a 1TB model for $150, 2TB for $300, and 4TB for $600. As with all other QLC NAND drives, the 860 QVO is relatively speedy for reads and short-burst writes. But it slows down drastically when it has to write large data sets. That’s where the single-layer cache comes in. This ensures that the 860 QVO should work really well in real-world scenarios for most average users.