Samsung Discount Programs: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" Solid State Drive Expired

the student verification they use requires SSN - think twice about providing your SSN and other sensitive info just to save a few ten$

Finally, a big capacity ssd drive for my porn collection. Got 10 of them, thanks

The reliability problems with QLC pretty much disappear with larger capacity. The number of writes you can make per NAND cell decreases going from TLC to QLC. But you can offset that by increasing the number of cells. e.g.

A 120 GB 850 EVO (TLC) was rated at 75 TBW. You could hit that in 5 years writing just 41 GB per day. That's why everyone said to stick with MLC back then.
A 1 TB 860 EVO (TLC) was rated at 600 TBW. You'd need to write 329 GB/day to hit that in 5 years. Making this a safe buy for most users.
A 1 TB 870 QVO (QLC) is rated at 360 TBW. That drops the daily write to 200 GB/day to last 5 years, so it was a step down in reliability.
A 8 TB 870 QVO (QLC) is rated at 2880 TBW. You'd have to write 1.58 TB/day to hit that in 5 years. So even though TBW per GB is lower, the TBW for the entire drive is much higher.

https://www.samsung.com/semicondu.../warranty/

So don't base your opinion on SSD reviews and forum posts from 4 years ago. A lot has changed since then. It didn't make sense to get a 16 or 32 GB MLC SSD, but MLC was OK once capacities got to about 120-250 GB. It didn't make sense to get a 120 GB TLC SSD, but TLC was OK once capacities got to about 500GB - 1 TB. And it probably doesn't make sense to get a 1 TB QLC SSD (the price difference with a 1TB TLC drive only works out to about $10, so just pay the extra $10 and get nearly 2x the endurance). But QLC is OK once capacities get to about 4-8 TB.

Just be smart about checking the rated TBW and comparing to how much data you expect to write to the drive per year. Most SSDs have a tool which lets you see the total number of writes. So you can just take that and divide it by the number of years you've used the drive. For most users, these drives will last decades, with the larger capacities lasting over a century before you'll encounter write endurance problems.

Even for heavier users, these larger capacities means write endurance has mostly disappeared as a factor. I used a 250 GB TLC drive in a security camera system, and retired it after 3 years. It was rated for just 150 TBW, and had already hit 300 TBW. I replaced it with a 2 TB TLC drive rated at 1200 TBW, so I'd expect it to last at least 12 years in this application, possibly as long as 20 years. In 20 years I'll probably be able to replace it with a 100 TB drive for $100.


I know everyone hates data caps. But they're necessary for the lower pricing we enjoy. An OC3 is a dedicated fiber connection giving you 155 Mbps. It costs about $30,000 pe rmonth. If you got a 100 Mbps plan and expected to be able to download at 100 Mbps 24/7, you'd expect your monthly Internet bill to be about $20,000.

The only way they're able to get this price down to about $50/mo is to group you together with hundreds of other people. All off you share the same Internet connection. Usage tends to be bursty, so you may hit 100 Mbps occasionally, but the vast majority of the time you're down near zero Mbps. That allows you to share the same connection and get 100 Mbps speeds when you want, while only paying for what a dedicated 512 kbps connection would cost.

But this sharing only works if nobody sits on that connection pulling its max bandwidth 24/7. Data caps serve to prevent people from doing that and driving up the price for everyone else. If you really need uncapped data, talk to your ISP about getting a business plan. Those typically don't have a cap but cost more. (Still pretty reasonable, since almost no business saturates their connection 24/7, and most ISPs are able to distribute bandwidth over tens of thousands of customers.)