Samsung 870 QVO SSDs pump up capacity to a whopping 8TB

Samsung today announced a new lineup of 2.5-inch quad-level cell SSDs that will all be part of the 870 QVO series. Storage options for these drives start out in familiar territory with 1TB, 2TB, and even 4TB models, but for the 870 QVO, Samsung is rolling out the big guns, announcing that the series will be home to an 8TB drive as well. Expect that to cost a pretty penny when it releases later this year.

While an 8TB SSD might be a bit much for average users, Samsung is promising that these 870 QVO drives bridge the gap between SSDs and HDDs, offering both the "superior performance" of an SSD and the capacity of a hard drive. The 870 QVO SSD follows the 860 QVO, which was Samsung's first quad-level cell drive released in 2018.

These SSDs connect using SATA 6 Gbps and are capable of sequential read-write speeds of up to 560/530 MB per second. Samsung also says that the 870 QVO's random read/write speed of 98K/88K IOPS represents a 13% improvement over its predecessor. Each drive comes with a certain amount of LPDDR4 DRAM too: 1GB for the 1TB drive, 2GB for the 2TB one, 4GB for the 4TB drive, and – you guessed it 8GB for the 8TB drive.

All but the 8TB drive are launching today at "select retailers" and at Samsung's website. The 1TB drive will set you back a fairly reasonable $129.99, while the price jumps up to $249.99 for the 2TB one. Finally, you're looking at a total price of $499.99 for the 4TB model, which definitely isn't chump change but could be worth the cost if you specifically need a lot of SSD storage.

As for the 8TB 870 QVO, which is undoubtedly the star of today's announcement, we're largely being left in the dark. Samsung says that the drive will be out sometime in August, but it didn't say anything about pricing in today's announcement. Looking at the price of that 4TB SSD – and considering that 8TB capacities are pretty rare among consumer drives – we can almost certainly expect a price tag that's prohibitively expensive for most people. Stay tuned.