Value-Oriented Samsung 860 QVO SSDs spotted at retailers

Samsung’s QLC-powered 860 QVO SSDs have started to appear at European retailers, referencing a December ETA and pricing that sits below the company’s current SATA offerings, delivering consumers more value for money.  

QLC NAND is designed to offer four bits per cell, delivering a 33% increase in capacity over the TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND that is used in most consumer-oriented SSDs. This increase in capacity comes with relatively little silicon cost, lowering the price per GB of the NAND type, allowing SSDs to be built at lower price points. 

To work around the performance disadvantages of QLC NAND, Samsung has created their 860 QVO (Quality and Value Optimised) SSD with 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, parallelising enough NAND to mitigate the disadvantages of lower capacity drives, delivering their advertised sequential read/write speeds of 550MBps/520MBps and random performance of 96,000 IOPS read and 89,000 IOPS write.

At this time it is unknown how Samsung has configured their 860 QVO SSDs, considerations that will no doubt impact the performance of these drives. Samsung has advertised their 860 QVO drives with a three-year warranty, which is two years lower than the 5-year warranty that their 860 EVO drives hold. 
 

  

Techpowerup estimated that these drives would cost €140, €270 and €540 (inc. VAT) respectively for their 1TB, 2TB and 4TB variants, with Samsung hoping to use these drives to popularise 1TB SSDs amongst PC builders.  

At this time the real-world performance downsides of this drive’s use of QLC NAND are unknown, though Samsung’s focus on high capacities and high parallelised NAND will no doubt result in decent levels of SSD performance, after all, the SATA interface isn’t that difficult to saturate these days. 

You can join the discussion on Samsung’s 860 QVO series SSDs on the OC3D Forums.