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Comment by 00deadbeef | Hacker News Reader

I had big hopes for Samsung’s QVO line but they’ve barely done anything with it. They’re often not much cheaper than EVO. And the 8TB drive is almost £200 more expensive than 20TB of spinning rust. I could get 30TB+ storage for the same money.

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That makes sense considering that QLC (2^4 charge levels) only stores 33% more data per cell than TLC (2^3 charge levels). Therefore at best it can only be 33% cheaper/bigger.

QLC is 2x TLC (16/8=2).

Quad bits to triple bits is 4/3=1.33. Taking your way of counting to the extreme: if I have a cell that can handle 1 million bits, I can't just add an extra bit of storage for another 1 million bits of storage. I have to actually add the full megabit of storage.

Yes, you are right. I mixed it up with the change from SLC to MLC where 1 extra bit was double the density.

Have you looked at something like Intel 660p? They're pretty crappy as SSDs go, but they're quite cheap (by about 40% compared to what I would put into my desktop, at least where I live).

Largest size is only 2 TB, and they aren’t cheaper than e.g. Samsung QVO, as far as I can see.

The Intel 660p is a higher-tier product than Samsung QVO drives. Both use QLC, but the Intel drives are NVMe and thus have much higher peak performance (when operating out of the SLC cache). But Intel wasn't interested in pursuing the niche of users who wanted more than 2TB in a consumer drive.

Yes, but the topic was about QVO drives still being too expensive in terms of $/TB. The Intel drives don’t really help in that respect.

I wouldnt touch Intel SSD. They ship documentation stating read-only failure mode in case of reaching end of life/defects. In a big endurance test some time ago Intel drive simply died and vanished from the system on reboot, followed up by Intel mouthpiece claiming _this is by design_.

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

"After a reboot, the SSD disappeared completely from the Intel software. It was still detected by the storage driver, but only as an inaccessible, 0GB SATA device.

According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what’s supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive. "

That article is nearly 10 years old.

Intel bribe scandal was 20 years ago, and they still do it after tweaking (clients receive free hardware instead of straight $) to not be so blatantly illegal. "Cripple AMD" ICC/MKL was 13 years ago yet "Arc 380 drivers do not support ReBar on AMD's Ryzen CPUs, the functionality only works with this technology on Intel's own processors."

They were going for around 70 dollars for a tb on newegg before prime day. You might want to be on the lookout.

Once the SLC cache is exhausted on a drive like the 660p, sustained writes drop to below 100MBs

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