Samsung 860 QVO - Huge SSD Capacities At An Affordable Price

Cheaper, bigger; but at what cost?

- Jeremy Laird

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. That’s essentially how it’s shaken out with the new generation of QLC solid-state drives. QLC, of course, refers to the quad-level cells in the latest NAND flash memory, translating into four bits of data stored per cell, and thereby increasing storage density over existing TLC or triple-level cell NAND by a hefty and instant 33 percent.

What’s not to like? With the Crucial BX500 and Adata SU630, quite a lot. The downsides to QLC memory are the same in character as every other increase in NAND memory cell data density to date. The problem is scope. When the original single-level memory cell was usurped by MLC cells, which store two bits per cell, both performance and endurance suffered. That happened again when TLC upped the ante to three bits per cell.