Samsung announces 2TB consumer-oriented SSDs; 2TB 850 Evo for $800, and 850 Pro for $1,000
Samsung brings 2TB solid-state drives to your home PC — You no longer have to bend over backwards to get more than a terabyte of fast, flash-based storage in your home computer.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is one stop on Samsung's rapid 2015 march up the flash-capacity curve: six months after launching the portable T1 line topping out at 1TB for $600, it is doubling consumer internal capacity to 2TB at $800–$1,000. The move lands just before the V-NAND and NVMe-based 950 Pro arrives in October, giving Samsung both a high-capacity SATA play and a speed play within the same quarter.
First-order effects
- Buyers who previously had to choose between a fast 1TB SSD or a slow multi-terabyte hard drive can now get 2TB of flash in a standard consumer drive — at prices still well above spinning disk.
- Samsung's own product stack gets crowded: the 850 Evo/Pro launch sits weeks ahead of the 950 Pro, splitting its premium lineup between capacity and NVMe speed.
Second-order effects
- Rival drive makers face pressure to match the 2TB consumer tier or cede the high-capacity segment to Samsung, which already holds a quarter of Q2 NAND shipments and can price from a scale advantage.
- The 2.5-inch 16TB SSD Samsung unveiled a month later shows the same V-NAND density flowing downstream first into enterprise, tightening the pipeline that eventually feeds consumer capacities like this one.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — capacity doubling while prices fall, with Computerworld already reporting consumer SSD and hard-drive prices nearing parity by December — flash displaces hard drives in mainstream PCs rather than remaining a premium option, with Samsung's vertical NAND production setting the pace.
The trend: Flash storage is climbing the capacity ladder faster than prices climb with it, moving SSDs from enthusiast upgrades toward default PC storage.