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back to article The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

Samsung has started mass production of the world's first QLC (quad-level cell) consumer SSD. QLC is 4 bits/cell flash technology and a next step in cell bit capacity from the current TLC (3 bits/cell). Foundries belonging to Intel/Micron, SK Hynix and WD/Toshiba have started producing QLC chips and, in some cases, SSDs already …

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          1. 404
            Reply Icon

            Re: Maybe, maybe not.

            >But ultimately, I foresee some sort of ultra-high density write-once media being developed for long term archival storage.

            Already has with MDISC - a bit pricey but worth it imo.

            3 0 Reply
            1. Charles 9
              Reply Icon

              Re: Maybe, maybe not.

              "Already has with MDISC - a bit pricey but worth it imo."

              Meh...pricey AND the capacity sucks. We need something like M-DISC but with capacities in the multi-TB range. I don't mind if it's slow (I once used a floppy-bus QIC tape drive), just to be able to reliably archive lots of stuff, and there isn't one in the consumer sphere at this time.

              1 1 Reply
      2. Alan Brown Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        "When that happens, that manufacturer will probably just ditch all of the R&D (no point in future development after a certain point) and just churn out cheap drives on their existing equipment."

        Which is what happened a few years ago at both Seagate and WD. HAMR was the last development to come out of the R&D labs before they closed. It's been in the engineering labs trying to be turned into a commercial product ever since.

        3 0 Reply
    2. Christian Berger
      Reply Icon

      "In the field of computing that's not bad for a 60's technology!"

      Well... not exactly, most technologies from that time 1960s are still in use. Semiconductor DRAM is one example which is still the most common form of RAM in computers which use more than 32 Megabytes of it. In a way even flash memory borrows its core idea from DRAM.

      The same goes for operating systems. Unix lives on in the form of the BSDs and Linux. Multics lives on in Windows and Systemd. People still use Maxima on a daily basis.

      5 1 Reply
      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
        Reply Icon
        Trollface

        "Multics lives on in Windows and Systemd."

        I see what you did there.

        6 0 Reply
      2. onefang
        Reply Icon

        "Well... not exactly, most technologies from that time 1960s are still in use."

        My wetwear is from the '60s, and it's still going strong.

        1 0 Reply
    3. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Meh

      There's good reason to go SSD for a laptop. Not so much for a desktop.

      If anything, there is more reason now to have more than one internal storage device. Hot swap bays should be mainstream now so that it doesn't have to be a painful process when you want more internal storage space.

      1 0 Reply
  2. steviebuk Silver badge

    Until the price...

    ...is right I'll still be stuck buying old skool platter drives. Still cheaper than large SSDs. Having said that, where I can afford it, I do replace old drives with SSDs. Like I did in my Lenovo. A cheap 1TB SSD has brought new life into my old war horse. Boots into Windows 7 in around a min now where as with the old skool drive it was taking about 5 mins.

    8 2 Reply
    1. Gene Cash Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Until the price...

      > Still cheaper than large SSDs

      Sure, but the SSDs are such a metric assload faster, and so noticeably improved the response of my PC, I coughed up the extra dosh. The performance was worth the price.

      At least Samsung isn't doing a Kodak and ignoring SSDs, hoping they'll go away.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Until the price...

        >Sure, but the SSDs are such a metric assload faster, and so noticeably improved the response of my PC, I coughed up the extra dosh. The performance was worth the price.

        Would you cough up the dosh to store all your photos and videos though? What if you were a commercial operation. Would you cough up 10x to store data that barely changes?

        For the consumer it depends on how much physical space there is and how savvy they are. Few laptops have space for even one SSD let alone an SSD and an HDD (they use M.2). I have two of them, and neither have SSDs. Many people don't have desktops any more and will buy a NAS device to store things, or if they're daft, hand it over to Google, Apple etc.

        For those of us who still use desktops (or NAS) HDDs are still the best way to go. My main desktop PC has two SSDs and two HDDs in. I probably didn't need the second SSD.

        In the enterprise, ideally you want frequently accessed data somewhere quick and infrequently accessed data somewhere cheap and well-protected. The ability to sort data and place it properly keeps the industry going.

        4 1 Reply
        1. Alan Brown Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Until the price...

          "For those of us who still use desktops (or NAS) HDDs are still the best way to go."

          If you want to make best use of large HDDs, then you need to front them with SSD caching (read caching and write intent cache) to mitigate the seek penalties.

          The size of that cache depends on the kinds of loads you're generating. The way you do it depends on what you have available. I prefer ZFS for large arrays as it's got zero downtime for fsck(*), but you can cache bsd/linux LVM and Windows servers have their own implementations.

          "In the enterprise, ideally you want frequently accessed data somewhere quick and infrequently accessed data somewhere cheap and well-protected. The ability to sort data and place it properly keeps the industry going."

          In the enterprise old style, that was the case. When you have large scale automatic tiering/caching then this kind of balancing act becomes much easier. That's why ZFS is a godsend when the "infrequently accessed data" suddenly becomes "hot" for whatever reason.

          (*) Some of my older installations have 3-400TB of storage onboard. If they decide they need fsck at startup, that makes for a long delay.

          3 0 Reply
      2. JEDIDIAH
        Reply Icon
        Mushroom

        Re: Until the price...

        This isn't 1983. This doesn't need to be some brain dead false dichotomy.

        Also I still find the idea that a modern OS is so disk bound that you need to use an SDD as a bandaid to be pretty pathetic.

        1 0 Reply
  3. jms222

    Booting time

    Yes it's a benchmark but if you really _do_ boot a lot you should look and sleep and hibernation options like we've had for years. Other advantage is things are where you left them.

    6 4 Reply
    1. Claverhouse Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Booting time

      @jms222

      Other advantage is things are where you left them.

      Or in KDE System Settings, Startup and Shutdown/Desktop Session tick Restore previous session

      3 0 Reply

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Where's my

      Here. You'll need at least £180.

      4 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Where's my

        Thats just over 2.3* the price of a new drive 7200rpm 64MB cache spinning rust.

        Catch is that it has to be slimline <9mm

        0 0 Reply
        1. phuzz Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Alert

          Re: Where's my

          Faster, Cheaper, High capacity, choose two.

          If you don't care about speed then stick with your cheap harddrive.

          If you do care about speed then you'll either have to pay more for the 1TB SSD, or buy a smaller capacity one.

          1 0 Reply
      2. Alan Brown Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Where's my

        The fun part is getting a PATA to M2 adaptor and then cropping a suitable msata card into it.

        It's cheaper than getting a PATA ssd and _much_ faster (the pata SSDs tend to be crap). You'll find your old workhorses start moving at unbelievable speeds.

        This is also a good way of keeping various scada kit and things like ancient CNC equipment alive.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Where's my

          If we're talking something THAT ancient, you're probably better off adapting a Compact Flash onto the thing (CF is actually based on IDE/PATA--should be a lot easier to adapt).

          0 0 Reply
  5. Merrill

    What will be the data retention lifetime?

    When you access that file that hasn't been rewritten since the OS was first installed ten years ago, will it still be there?

    4 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What will be the data retention lifetime?

      Your file is always being moved around by the wear levelling algorithms. That's why ensuring TRIM is functioning with whatever OS / drive encryption product is so important, so that deleted space is indeed deleted and available for wear levelling by the drive's internal gubbins.

      I do wonder how adding more and more layers to a single cell affects it's lifespan though. Anyone?

      1 0 Reply
      1. eldakka
        Reply Icon

        Re: What will be the data retention lifetime?

        I do wonder how adding more and more layers to a single cell affects it's lifespan though.

        Hugely.

        However, amortised across an entire 4TB SSD, lower write endurance should be acceptable for anything outside very high write I/O loads. e.g. database logs, caches in front of large arrays, etc, which is what SLC or Optane or other future technologies like MRAM are for.

        Depending on source, typical max program-erase cycles are:

        SLC 50k-100k > eMLC 20k-30k > MLC 5k-10k > 3DTLC 1k-10k > pTLC 1-5k > QLC 0.1k-0.5k (aka hundreds, not thousands).

        SLC: Single-level cell, 1b/cell

        eMLC: enterprise-class Multi-level cell, 2b/cell

        MLC: Multi-level cell (consumer-class), 2b/cell

        3DTLC: 3-d (stacked) Three-level cell, 3b/cell

        pTLC: planar (2D, non-stacked) Three-level cell, 3b/cell

        QLC: Quad-level cell, 4b/cell

        2 0 Reply
  6. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

    Speaking as a person who uses a variety of 6-8 TB drives in my media server... and as I've said many times before.

    Until consumers can buy a 4TB drive for the same price as a regular mechanical one... spinning rust will live on.

    HDD prices have been kept artificially high for years, and the EU is supposed to be investigating this... but I've heard nothing for sometime on the matter.

    I've been able to pick up my drives in sales for a lot less than they normall go for. An 8TB purple drive for £150 instead of well over £200 and 6TB drives for an average of £128 instead of around the £180 mark.

    My media server currently has a 3TB & a 4TB drive and those I'll be replacing next... So I'll be needing more 6-8TB models and there's no way SSD will be at that capacity and price range for many, many years to come... If ever.

    4 0 Reply
    1. quxinot
      Reply Icon

      I think I'm on the same page as everyone else as far as price, though I don't think we have to see absolute parity between the two styles--perhaps a 10% premium against the middle of the pricing band would be acceptable to most.

      But what I'm waiting for is a SSD that actually can replace my NAS's drives. In that instance, I'm looking for price and longevity mostly. Speed isn't particularly important as the dozen drives can saturate a gigabit link without working terribly hard. So why hasn't a manufacturer come out with a medium format (3.5" rather than 2.5" or 5.25) SSD that can be stuffed chock to the gills with chips from the previous generation--where the fab is paid for and failure rates are low, so easy to make reliable profits on--and designed NAS drives? Start showing me 2-4Tb units in a larger case with good endurance within 10% of the price of something like a WD Red, and I suspect there's a vast amount of money to be made.

      Nevermind that that same drive could be jammed into a normal desktop by an OEM for significantly cheaper than a 'fast' SSD of the more current designs, and allow the OEM to put a big sticker boasting about it having "not just an SSD but a bigger one than the competition" on the box, and I suspect they'd be onto a winner.

      But then I'm the cheapskate that's still using a dozen used rusty 2Tb drives in my NAS because that was the sweet spot for cost:space, and let ZFS pick up the reliability (which honestly, has been excellent). Makes you wonder just how fat the profit margins are, and how much that's pushing for bragging rights in the speed arena. That said, I just also put a fancy M.2 into my main gaming rig, and the speed is really noticable, but the pricing makes it dumb for storing ...uh... cat videos.

      8 0 Reply
      1. Alan Brown Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        > So why hasn't a manufacturer come out with a medium format (3.5" rather than 2.5" or 5.25) SSD that can be stuffed chock to the gills with chips from the previous generation

        Because demand is mostly still outstripping supply for production of those chips and in the larger case formats getting rid of heat becomes a little problematic - especially with older (hotter) generations of chips which in turn kills reliability. Heat is one of the reasons that M2 is becoming popular. Getting rid of the case makes cooling much easier. 2.5" is a legacy case format. Anything larger is from the dark ages.

        If your motherboard can't directly take M2 devices, there's a legion of addin cards. I've seen up to 4 mSATAs supported on one card and StarTech sell a neat wee pcie card that takes a NVMe drive on one side, with 2 msata carriers on the other that plug back to the motherboard ports.

        There's talk of NAND oversupply, but it's more catchup than anything else. In any case SSD prices _are_ falling whilst HDD prices are relatively static.

        2 0 Reply
        1. Charles 9
          Reply Icon

          Fat lot of good when your laptop ONLY takes SATA (M2 pretty much has to be built into laptops). And desktops will have a hard time using an add on when the only slot that can carry it runs the GPU.

          3 1 Reply
          1. eldakka
            Reply Icon

            Fat lot of good when your laptop ONLY takes SATA (M2 pretty much has to be built into laptops). And desktops will have a hard time using an add on when the only slot that can carry it runs the GPU.

            Then you aren't buying the right laptops or desktops.

            While that's the case now, I would expect things to change in the future as trends change, as always happens.

            One of the motherboards for the new Threadripper CPU (admittedly not exactly in the standard consumer class) comes with 6 M.2 x4 connectors, 2 onboard and the other 4 from an included PCIe add-in card.

            Expect this sort of thing to creep down into the consumer space over the next few years. Some consumer motherboards right now have 2 M.2 slots onboard. If M.2 becomes the consumer standard such that it displaces 2.5"/3.5" form factors, then expect motherboards to ship with more.

            Yes, if you want 4 M.2 right now on a consumer mITX board that only has one long PCIe slot for a GPU you are SoL. But if you want that many M.2, then you need to purchase a motherboard that can support that many, just like if you want 10 SATA drives you need to purchase a motherboard that can support 10 SATA or has additional PCIe expansion slots to add more SATA ports from add-in cards (or purchase one that supports SATA expanders, which is pretty rare in the consumer space).

            3 0 Reply
            1. Charles 9
              Reply Icon

              "Then you aren't buying the right laptops or desktops."

              OR we're using older, "good enough" kit that was bought in an era when M.2 didn't exist yet.

              3 1 Reply
          2. Alan Brown Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            "Fat lot of good when your laptop ONLY takes SATA"

            I'll leave you with THIS: https://www.startech.com/HDD/Adapters/m2-sata-adapter~S322M225R

            Or If you have a truely ancient laptop, THIS: https://www.lindy.co.uk/components-tools-c7/drive-caddies-raid-c321/msata-to-2-5-ide-ssd-drive-7mm-p8706

            You can get them considerably cheaper than the figures above if you look around and they both work fairly well.

            Of course, in a desktop, space isn't so much of an issue anyway.

            You could always use an expresscard SSD, but it's no faster than a sata bus and they've pretty much gone from the market.

            1 0 Reply
        2. eldakka
          Reply Icon

          If your motherboard can't directly take M2 devices, there's a legion of addin cards. I've seen up to 4 mSATAs supported on one card and StarTech sell a neat wee pcie card that takes a NVMe drive on one side, with 2 msata carriers on the other that plug back to the motherboard ports.

          The new MSI X399 Creation motherboard as reported on Anandtech comes with a PCIe x16 card that has 4 (!) M.2 x4 connectors.

          1 0 Reply
  7. RantyDave

    So SSD's get another quanta cheaper; consumers are starting to keep stuff in "the cloud" as a matter of course; and 100mbit fibre to the home is a reality. I'd say it's over for spinny rust except, maybe, as a nearline backup.

    0 1 Reply
    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      "and 100mbit fibre to the home is a reality"

      In some areas.

      And specifically to the home.

      Meanwhile, SATA 3.2 is also a reality, works both ways, is 160 times faster, and is on an uncontended link. This consumer will be keeping his stuff in the PC as a matter of course for the time being, thanks.

      7 0 Reply
      1. JEDIDIAH
        Reply Icon
        Devil

        Pants! Pants I say!

        Spinning rust on a NAS is still 10x faster than the nonsense he's talking about.

        1 0 Reply
    2. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      You must be joking.

      100mbit is pants for file transfer speed.

      Gigabit is a bad enough throttling of storage tech. 100mbit is like being banished into the 90s (or worse).

      Forget about this SSD fantasy? When are we going to get affordable consumer level 10G ethernet?

      1 0 Reply
  8. vincent himpe

    Wake me when i can get a 2TB for 60$

    Any point in time before that is nonsense.

    It may be technically feasible to make 4TB SSD's but not at the price point of spinning rust ....

    Only when they are in the same price range give or take 10% will mechanical drives go away.

    5 0 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Samsung's new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald

    blahblahblahfartblah

    0 2 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Samsung's new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald

      Your analysis is intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

      1 0 Reply
  10. hellwig

    32x1Tb?

    I think you mean 32Tx1. 32T addresses of single bits.

    Otherwise, you have 32 addressable blocks of 1terabit each, that's a lot of buffering needed for reads and writes.

    However, is it true you can read a single bit from 4layer flash (it's entirely possible, I just don't know).

    1 0 Reply
    1. really_adf
      Reply Icon

      Re: 32x1Tb?

      I think the article meant 32 1Tb chips (of unspecified organisation).

      1 0 Reply
  11. Fading
    Unhappy

    I have 8.75 TB of local storage.....

    On my home machine - only the .75 is a combination of SSD and NVME, Yes I would love to have more solid state but the costs will have to drop significantly.

    2 0 Reply
  12. Snowy Silver badge
    Facepalm

    A SSD on a Sata III...

    makes about as much sense as driving a supercar around with the hand brake on.

    While "The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs" it will not happen while you use such a slow interface!

    The device uses 32 x 1Tbit (128GB) 64-layer V-NAND die and does 540MB/sec sequential reads and 520MB/sec sequential writes, looks like it is hitting the limit of Sata.

    If we look at a HDD say the Seagate BarraCuda (1TB around £40 and 2TB for about £52) (https://hddmag.com/seagate-barracuda-review/) we see it has does 210.9MB/sec sequential reads and 205.2MB/sec sequential writes. Yes quite a lot slow but at a massively lower price, which in the mass market is key.

    For speed you would want something like 970 EVO POLARIS 2TB M.2 2280 PCI-E 3.0 X4 NVME SOLID STATE DRIVE, (3500MB/sec sequential reads and 2500MB/sec sequential writes)

    TLDR if your going to go and buy a still relatively expensive SSD over a HDD for increased performance atleast ditch the handbrake that is the SATA III interface.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: A SSD on a Sata III...

      But for many of us, that's all we have to work with...

      2 1 Reply
    2. anoncow
      Reply Icon

      Re: A SSD on a Sata III...

      "makes about as much sense as driving a supercar around with the hand brake on"

      For bulk SSD that trades off access time against density, SATA still makes perfect sense. 600 Mbytes/sec is a beefy transfer rate compared to physical disk, but the big win is zero seek time. Use M.2 for your system disk.

      3 0 Reply
    3. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: A SSD on a Sata III...

      > makes about as much sense as driving a supercar around with the hand brake on.

      Nope. Sata's still useful, These big SSDs aren't particularly fast. They can max out a sata bus but they're not much faster than that even though they blow HDDs out of the water on latency.The tradeoff is heat.

      Think of these as a large Box van. The increased performance is only part of the equation when buying them. Reduced power consumption & noise, vastly faster startup (which means they can sleep faster and that drops the power consumption even more) and massively longer lifespans than spenning drives are where these win out.

      0 0 Reply
  13. bjr

    Hard drives have had a good run, 62 years so far

    The IBM RAMAC was introduced in 1956, 5MCharacters on forty 24" platters. It's really amazing that a mechanical technology from the 1950s has managed to hang on this long. Vacuum tubes were gone within a couple of years of the introduction of the RAMAC, core memory was replaced by DRAMs 40 years ago, tape is long gone. My guess is that SSDs will still be more expensive than hard drives for the next few years so the hard drive may be able to hold on until it's eligible for full social security.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Snowy Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      Re: Hard drives have had a good run, 62 years so far

      True but in all your examples the newer technology was fast, cheaper and more reliable with a better life span, sadly at this point SSD over HDD is faster, more expensive and with a short life span.

      1 1 Reply
  14. J27

    Samsung's announcement seems to defy reality, seeing as the Intel 660p already has reviews, prices and full specs up. How can a product that is just being produced now be "first"?

    2 1 Reply
  15. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Windows

    4Tb ... of what?

    Yes, we're needing more storage all the time ... but for what? it's all buffers and application/operating system caches ... mostly we're just storing more trash.

    3 2 Reply
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: 4Tb ... of what?

      Tell that to someone with a serious media or Steam collection.

      6 0 Reply

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