After being announced a few weeks back, the Samsung 860 QVO series is beginning to ship as a new, lower-cost SATA 3.0 SSD offering. The Samsung 860 QVO series offers four bit per cell flash memory to usher in a new era of lower-cost solid-state storage with the now-shipping 1TB model costing just $150 USD while the 2TB version coming soon at $300 USD and $600 USD for a 4TB edition.

This Samsung 64-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory is paired with Samsung's proven MJX controller. Samsung rates the 860 QVO series for sequential reads of 550 MB/s and sequential writes of 520MB/s or lower when hitting the QLC memory rather than the cache.

Samsung is backing these new entry-level SATA 3.0 SSDs with a three-year warranty.

Curious about the performance potential under Linux, I purchased a Samsung 860 QVO 1TB SSD for benchmarking under Linux.