Samsung has announced that it is starting production of high capacity QLC-based SSD for the consumer market. The new SSD is built using the industry’s first 4-bit quad-level cell (QLC) memory modules that promises more storage without going thicker or larger.

The first drives using the Samsung V-NAND QLC chips will have 4TB of capacity out of the gate. The QLC chips will be slower than Triple-Layer Cell (TLC) chips, but with read/write speeds of 540MB/s and 520MB/s respectively, it will be speedy enough to access and edit 4K footage in real time. Each memory module is Samsung’s newest 1Terabit V-NAND module.

Samsung managed to have the high read/write speeds thanks to the use of TurboWrite tech as well as a 3-bit SSD controller that helps improve the read and writing speeds of its QLC modules. Apart from the 4TB drives, there will be lower capacities of 1TB and 2TB as well. All the drives will be released sometime in Q4 of 2018, which is around the Holiday season.

“Samsung’s new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald a massive move to terabyte-SSDs for consumers,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president of memory sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics. “As we expand our lineup across consumer segments and to the enterprise, 4-bit terabyte-SSD products will rapidly spread throughout the entire market.”

As of press time, there is no official pricing for the new Samsung QLC drives. With that said, we can expect the drives to be priced similarly or even cheaper to current drives available on the market, with prices expected to be around USD 0.25 cents per Gigabyte (USD1 = RM4)

As a side note, Samsung also said that the same 1Terabit 4-bit V-NAND chip, it will be able to efficiently produce a 128GB memory card for smartphones that will lead the charge toward higher capacities for high-performance memory storage.