Samsung starts mass producing 4-bit QLC consumer SSDs – Up to 4TB capacities

At 2018’s Flash Memory Summit (FMS), Samsung has announced that they are mass producing the world’s first consumer-grade QLC SSD, offering capacities of up to 4TB while delivering performance levels that can saturate the SATA interface, providing sequential read/write performance of 540MB/s and 520 MB/s respectively.  

QLC NAND offers users 4 bits of data storage per cell, providing a 100% storage boost over MLC NAND and a 33% increase over commonly used TLC NAND, allowing Samsung to offer higher capacity storage while using fewer NAND dies, therefore increasing the price/capacity of SSD storage. 

Samsung claims that their 64-layer 4-bit QLC V-NAND SATA SSD can offer the same performance levels as an equivalent SSD that is powered by 3-bit TLC V-NAND, while also providing a three-year warranty. 

In addition to SATA-based consumer SSDs, Samsung also plans to release QLC-powered M.2 NVMe SSDs to the enterprise market later this year. Samsung plans to offer their QLC-based consumer SSDs with capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, though at this time Samsung has not specified a release date or pricing levels.