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  • Arnulf - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Hey Samsung, no need to tarnish (SSD) brand name with QLC trash.

    Leave QLC garbage to low-end and mid-range peddlers and consider spinning off a separate low-range entity if you insist on going down the QLC route.
  • close - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Everybody will go down the QLC route. Just like they went from SLC to MLC to TLC. It's cost effective, it will have a real-life reliability close enough to everything else on the market now, and it's the most accessible way of fulfilling the ever increasing need for capacity.

    So whether you want to or not you'll be using "trash" in the near future.
  • Amandtec - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Samsung puts a SLC cache on their EVO drives, so unless you do unusual things with your computer the vast majority of all activity is happening there. You can also use Optane if you are super hardcore.
  • Alexvrb - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    For most consumers a halfway decent QLC design will be more than adequate for the life of their device, and it's a CRAPLOAD better and more reliable than a consumer-grade spinner. So if they can get densities up and prices down, I'm all for 96+ layer QLC for mainstream consumer systems - especially entry-level laptops!

    With that being said if you're an enthusiast and you're trying to go all-solid-state, QLC still has a purpose: Secondary storage. You use a fast MLC (or next-gen storage) PCIe-based NVMe drive (even M.2 x4 PCIe is good enough for all but the most elite systems) for the main storage. Then you can get a large QLC drive for storing video/music/etc. Data that doesn't get constantly manipulated won't wear the drive out, and it will be far more robust against random premature failures than consumer (or even many enterprise) spinners.
  • Alexvrb - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Fast *TLC. Sorry. TLC is plenty good, even though everyone wanted to go full Chicken Little when it started taking over.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Yay for 500 P/E cycles! That bar for endurance keeps getting lower. No doubt we'll be telling each other that QLC will be good enough for our needs just like we did for TLC NAND. There's no clear replacement for NAND flash out there as there's an absence of new, more durable storage technologies that have any momentum behind them. I had hopes for Optane, but it seems like its going to end up acting as slow RAM rather than durable solid state storage.
  • Reflex - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Optane is still ramping up, to early to tell where it's going. That said, despite ever lower numbers of cycles SSD reliability is very high. I'm honestly not worried about QLC, although my initial use will be in my NAS to finally replace spinning disks (assuming it can become cost competitive). When most operations are reads rather than rights the cycle total does not matter.
  • Amandtec - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    After several years with my SSD I think I am at 5. Yup, that two orders of magnitude still to go.

    The trick with Optane is to use it with Fuzedrive - 2GB DDR4, 32 GB Optane, 500 GB SSD, 4TB HDD - each order of magnitude in storage size is slower but cheaper. No need to store your 1Tb of cosplay photos on an Optane drive.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link

    Nonsense, I want my cosplay pics on fast Optane storage because they NEED to be accessible as quickly as possible as my whims dictate!

    In all seriousness, the tiered storage you're proposing is rather complicated and PCB/space/power intensive. I'd rather limit the number of levels in the storage pyramid to something like RAM, Internal Persistent Storage, External Backup. Your proposed path is realistic and perfectly reasonable for a desktop PC in a home managed by someone with a baseline understanding of technology. In my case, I don't own a desktop and I go days (sometimes a week or two) without even turning on my laptop. Systems like the Stream 11 Pro from HP are what I'd like to see in computers going forward due to their price, passive cooling, and simplicity. When my Latitude e6430 suffers from some sort of major failure, something like that is the likely future of x86/Windows computing for me. Adding layers of storage complexity makes that prospect difficult when you're dealing with such limits.
  • FullmetalTitan - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Have you ever even seen the EOL of an SSD by consumption of flash cell endurance? I have been using a shitty OCZ drive with a sandforce controller as a boot drive and primary app partition for like 6 years now and endurance metrics before last system build showed it at 92% drive lifetime still. I guarantee your drives will fail for one of 20 other reasons before you come close to flash endurance limits.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link

    Yes, twice with 120GB Patriot Torch drives.
  • Alexvrb - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Yay for zero empirical data supporting your claims! Yay for you can still buy a TLC drive if you need more speed and less capacity!
  • porcupineLTD - Saturday, July 28, 2018 - link

    Exactly the 960 evo from samsung which uses TLC already has under 500 p/e cycles (100TB TBW written for 250 GB drive) so the empirical evidence suggests that QLC will be under 500.
  • CheapSushi - Sunday, July 29, 2018 - link

    Actually the target from all of the players is 1,000 P/E cycles, the same as planar TLC.
  • AbRASiON - Thursday, July 26, 2018 - link

    Year after year after year, I wait for something to put in my NAS that isn't hot, spinning, noisy. Alas, nothing has come.

    I first wanted this in late 2014. News articles at the time and 2015 made me think, 2018 it might be viable.

    Now, 3.5 years later. I sit, thinking "maybe by 2021, my NAS will finally be rid of hot, noisy things?"
    Who knows, patience is a virtue I guess. It's been a long wait.
  • oRAirwolf - Friday, July 27, 2018 - link

    With Western Digital EasyStore 8TB external drives for $150 that can be shucked for the WD Red NAS inside, I can deal with a little heat and nose. QLC isn't going to hit that price point for a loooooong time. I have eight of those drives in a Dell T320 chassis running FreeNAS with a 10 gigabit link to my desktop and I get over 600 megabytes per second read and write with compression enabled in RAIDZ1. I think that is about as good as you're going to get for the time being. If you need faster storage, you could get an Icydock 4x2.5" or 8x2.5" drive bay adapter that goes into a 5.25 inch bay and have a separate pool for fast storage.

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