Over the past few years, Samsung has risen to dominate much of the consumer NAND business thanks to a stream of well-reviewed SSDs that combined excellent performance and low prices. The company’s first SSD with three-bit (Triple-level Cell, or TLC) NAND, the Samsung 840, offered modest performance but was quite affordable, and the Samsung 840 Evo upped the ante last year by combining slower TLC with faster SLC NAND. Now, Samsung is moving to combine its TLC NAND production and its 3D vertical NAND in a move that could hit a real consumer sweet spot.

One note is that Samsung is attempting to have its cake and eat it too as far as the NAND is concerned, referring to this as “3-bit multi-level cell (MLC).” That’s not how the term is typically used, and until Samsung demonstrates that it’s built TLC NAND with MLC characteristics in both performance and longevity, it’s a misapplication of terminology for the sake of marketing.

Underneath that marketing, however, there is reason to think that TLC built vertically could be superior to its traditional planar counterpart. Samsung’s 850 Pro, the first SSD to use V-NAND, has substantially better reliability and performance than traditional planar counterparts. If Samsung can keep those characteristics and extend them into a TLC drive, it could create the most attractive consumer drive on the market.

Samsung’s PR also inadvertently highlights the misleading ways that process nodes are used to market to consumers. While it claims that its 3D NAND is more than twice as productive per wafer as its 10nm-class NAND, an editor’s note remarks that “10 nanometer-class means a process technology node somewhere between 10 and 20 nanometers.” Independent analysis from Anandtech has shown that Samsung’s V-NAND has a very small die advantage over the leading 16nm NAND from Micron.

If Samsung’s V-NAND has truly doubled wafer productivity over its old “10nm-class” NAND, either its feature sizes were nowhere near as good as what Micron is building or its wafer yields were absolutely terrible. Or, as is most likely, it’s using alternate meanings of wafer productivity to make the comparison look better.

The reason I’m less concerned about the underlying technology, even if I’m snarky on the marketing, is because Samsung’s 3D NAND has already proven itself as a potent force and the company’s TLC drives have done equally well — even if the 840 Evo family has a performance issue with older data (there’s a fix for that coming in less than a week, if you own an affected drive). In short, there’s good reason to think the company can take the two products and combine them into something even better — possibly pushing SSDs below the 50 cents per GB line that they’ve been bumping against for a while.

Now read: How long do modern consumer SSDs actually last? Longer than you’d expect!