Two listings, one for an 8TB drive and one for a 1TB drive, have since been removed.
The 8TB 870 QVO was listed at $900 and available starting August 24, 2020. However, this is only an initial list price, and the real thing may be a bit cheaper. Still, even with a significant price drop, solid state storage is still not that cheap. [The 1TB 870 QVO was listed at a much more reasonable $130, about the same as the 860 QVO (the company's first consumer drive with QLC NAND flash). It is expected to be available starting June 30, 2020.
Neither read nor write speeds are listed for the two new QVO drives. The current generation 860 QVO has a direct write speed of only about 80 MB/s to the drive, but this is enhanced by a chunk of turbo SLC cache that delivers up to 520 MB/s. A similar system will likely be used in the next generation of drives.
What is QLC NAND' Most SSDs today are built using either single-level cell (SLC), multi-level cell (MLC), or triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory, which are essentially one, two, or three bits per cell represent. (Confusingly, Samsung calls them all MLC, with prefixes such as 1-bit, 2-bit, etc.) With each higher bit, the density per cell increases, meaning that the overall density of the SSD can be increased within the same general footprint.
In theory, this should mean larger and cheaper SSDs; the biggest barrier to QLC adoption is relative cost. Currently, QLCs struggle to outperform comparable TLC drives at the same price; this would not be much of an issue if there were no significant performance degradation of QLC drives.
QLC drives must be very inexpensive to justify the speed reduction and to make the large capacity worthwhile. Currently, QLC drives are a solid replacement for spinner platters in HDDs, but have yet to take the lead as a complete replacement. [Perhaps Samsung's latest drive will do much to change our minds. Judging by these Amazon listings, its release date doesn't seem too far off.
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