Samsung is about to make 4TB SSDs and mobile storage cheaper

A couple of years ago, Samsung launched its first 4TB solid state drives, which might as well not have existed given their $1,499 asking price. Today, the company announces the commencement of mass production of a more — though it’s too early to know exactly how much more — affordable variant with its 4TB QLC SSDs. The knock on QLC NAND storage has traditionally been that it sacrifices speed for an increased density, however Samsung promises the same 540MBps read and 520MBps write speeds for its new SSDs as it offers on its existing SATA SSD drives.

Describing this new family of storage drives, which will also include 1TB and 2TB variants, as consumer class, Samsung will obviously aim to price them at a level where quibbles about performance will be overwhelmed by the sheer advantage of having terabytes of space. Any concerns about the reliability of these drives should also be allayed by the three-year warranty promised by Samsung. The launch of the first drives built around these new storage chips is slated for later this year.

An intriguing side note in Samsung’s press release also indicates that the company will use the same technology “to efficiently produce a 128GB memory card for smartphones that will lead the charge toward higher capacities for high-performance memory storage.” Given the anticipated launch of a 512GB Galaxy Note 9 from Samsung, which is joining a growing cadre of half-terabyte phones, you might think the need for additional storage cards would be diminishing. But the other way to look at things is that those phones now exist precisely because we want ever more storage on our phones.