Your next laptop might have a 4TB SSD, thanks to Samsung

You can get a ton of storage for your new laptop — but you’ll probably have to pay an arm and a leg for it. Putting a 4TB SSD in the new MacBook Pro immediately adds $3,200 to the cost, for example. 

But Samsung’s new line of SSDs might change that. The company’s new 4TB QLC SSD is very fast and, though Samsung didn’t share exact pricing yet, it’s aimed primarily at consumers, not professionals. 

The new 4-bit drive, based on 1Tb V-NAND technology, will offer 540MB/s sequential read speed and 520MB/s sequential write speed, which is on the same level as the company’s 3-bit drives. In other words, you’re getting a lot more storage with the same performance as before, which is already fast enough for pretty much anything you can throw at it. 

And if you’re worried about reliability, know that these drives will have a pretty generous three-year warranty.

“Samsung’s new 4-bit SATA SSD will herald a massive move to terabyte-SSDs for consumers,” Jaesoo Han, executive VP of memory sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. We’re reading that as “they won’t be stupidly expensive,” though we’ll have to wait for full details on that. 

The company plans to launch these 4-bit SSDs in 2.5-inch form factor in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities this year. 

Interestingly, Samsung said it will use the same chip to “efficiently” produce a 128GB memory card for smartphones. This, Samsung claims, will “lead the charge toward higher capacities for high-performance memory storage” — so, presumably, these cards will eventually come in bigger capacities as well. There’s no word on pricing and launch date for the memory card.