Samsung’s new 870 QVO lineup features its first 8TB SSD for consumers

Samsung has introduced the next generation of its QVO lineup of high-capacity consumer solid-state drives: the 870 QVO. It will be available starting on June 30th from Samsung and other retailers, and you’ll be able to choose from a few different storage configurations.

The 870 QVO starts with 1TB at $129.99, moving up to 2TB of storage for $249.99 and $499.99 for the 4TB model. If you churn through a lot of data, you might be interested in the 8TB option that will be available in August, which is the first of this capacity Samsung has created. The price for the 8TB option isn’t public yet, though a leak on Amazon picked up earlier this month by Tom’s Hardware indicates it might cost $900 and release on August 24th.

The 870 QVO is the successor to the 860 QVO that released in late 2018, and the inner workings of this new drive are similar. It’s a SATA 2.5-inch drive that will fit in most desktops and laptops, and it utilizes Samsung’s 4-bit multilevel cell architecture (also known as quad-level, or QLC, in this model) that helps to keep the price reasonable at the expense of faster transfer speeds.

At that, the 870 QVO seems to offer a small bump up in speed improvements, both to its sequential read and write speeds at 560MB/s and 530MB/s — a 10MB/s gain in both categories over the predecessor. (Samsung says that its latest SSD has a 13 percent advantage over its predecessor when it comes to random read speed.)

Image: Samsung

The most appealing aspect of this new lineup is that it will bring an 8TB model to the market. And with this model, Samsung says that it should be able to transfer up to 2,880 terabytes of data throughout its lifetime. The SSDs with smaller capacities don’t have as high of a total throughput. The 4TB model is said to write 1,440TB total, while the 2TB and 1TB models are capable of writing 720TB and 360TB throughout their lifetimes, respectively. Each drive is covered by a three-year limited warranty.

Having an 8TB option is tempting, as game install sizes have gotten larger in the past few years, though this isn’t the best option if raw speed is really important to you. If your desktop’s motherboard has an M.2 slot, Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus NVMe 1TB SSD will offer vastly improved performance, though with smaller capacities available at a much higher price than the new 870 QVO.