Samsung has been a key player in the SSD world for years thanks to its cycle of highly competitive products. While its NVMe drives have garnered the most attention over the last couple of years, the company has been quietly expanding the rest of its portfolio with heavy hitters like the innovative T7 Touch. Today, they’re taking another step forward with the 870 QVO, a SATA-based SSD with a few unique tricks up its sleeve, high speeds, and an alluringly low price.
Specifications
- Current Pricing:
- $129.99 - 1TB
- $249.99 - 2TB
- $499.99 - 4TB
- TBD - 8TB
- Interface: SATA 6 Gbps
- Form Factor: 2.5-inch
- Storage Memory: Samsung V-NAND 4-bit MLC (QLC)
- Controller: Samsung MKX Controller
- DRAM
- 8GB LPDDR4 (8TB)
- 4GB LPDDR4 (4TB)
- 2GB LPDDR4 (2TB)
- 1GB LPDDR4 (1TB)
- Capacity: 8TB, 4TB, 2TB, 1TB
- Sequential: Read/Write Speed Up to 560/530 MB/s
- Random: Read/Write Speed Up to 98K/88K IOPS
- Management Software: Samsung Magician
- Total Bytes Written
- 2,880TB (8TB)
- 1,440TB (4TB)
- 720TB (2TB)
- 360TB (1TB)
- Warranty: Three-year limited warranty
The SSD market is more crowded than ever before, and it’s safe to say that not a week goes by without at least a few new drives being announced. At this point, there are very affordable options even in the high-capacity (1TB+) NVMe world, and with that kind of product flow, the question we should all be asking is why: why do you exist, what makes you special and not just another drive?
With the 870 QVO, Samsung answers that roundly, pitting this drive head to head with some of the best drives on the market and carving out its space as the high capacity SSD of choice today.. At $129 for 1TB and available in additional capacities of 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB (8TB in August), this is a line that clearly aims to push what consumers expect from SSD capacity. At the 1TB and 2TB levels, these prices aren’t the lowest (there is a bit of a new product premium being applied as these are fresh out of the gate), but position the drive squarely in the second rung of affordability. Not the cheapest, but for extra twenty, you lock in real world speed and reliability boosts that make the investment more than worthwhile.
Where these drives really seem to come into their own is at the 4TB and 8TB levels. At 4TB, the drive’s day one pricing is roughly $40 less than the competition, that quickly jumps higher with the next most expensive product. Pricing and in-depth details on the 8TB drive are not available now, but the paucity of those drives alone have caused prices to skyrocket. We’ll need to see final pricing to draw any final value conclusions, but it is very likely that the 870 QVO’S 8TB version will offer significant savings.
The reason I think this likely, and why the value proposition should increase with capacity, is that the drive is using QLC NAND flash. QLC is a 4-bit flash solution (compared to TLC’s 3-bit). Imagine these memory cells as stacked boxes. QLC allows you to stack boxes in towers of four. TLC only allows three. This greater “height” allows for higher densities of memory in less space and, theoretically, lower cost. The flip side is that larger memory stacks impact on write speed as electricity travels up and down the taller memory unit. Historically, this results in lower write speeds and reduced endurance, but Samsung has some clever tricks up its sleeve to mitigate both. In fact, the endurance here is competitive with TLC drives, offering 360TBW on the 1TB version, which is equal to the popular Crucial MX500 and only improves with size.
To overcome the write speed impact, Samsung is applying what they call Intelligent TurboWrite technology. This feature will intelligently adjust the buffer size from 6 - 42GB depending on what’s most efficient for the system and process being applied. This cache store increases to 78GB from the 2TB variant and up. This allows the drive to maintain higher write speeds and overall improved performance for longer periods of time. Once this runs out, however, speed drop dramatically (520 MB/s to 80 MB/s).
Within its cache buffer, the 870 QVO offers speeds that compete with the best SATA drives out there at 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively for sequential read and write performance. Random access speeds fall in line at 98K/88K IOPS. That puts it at the top of its tier and right alongside the 860 PRO in sequential speeds.
Let’s get into the benchmarks and see how it fared.
Benchmark Results
Test System: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU, Gigabyte X570 AORUS Master Motherboard, NZXT Kraken X72, G.Skill TridentZ Royal DDR4-3600MHz 16GB DRAM Kit, Corsair HX-1050 1050 Watt Power Supply.
To test the drive, I used our standard tools, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark, as well as complete a file transfer of a Skyrim directory to assess real-world, large scale copy/paste application. I also completed load time assessments in a variety of MMORPGs where large amounts of data would need to be loaded in. These are first time loads with no caching.
ATTO
Beginning with ATTO, this synthetic benchmark is used to cross-check manufacturer’s claims about speed. It’s a synthetic test that provides a “best-case scenario” for possible transfer speeds using sequential data that the drive is able to anticipate. The 870 QVO did well here, falling slightly short of the manufacturer's claims but nothing too far out of the ordinary.
CrystalDiskMark
Next, we move on to CrystalDiskMark. This is still a synthetic assessment but comes closer to real-world speeds thanks to its barrages of random data. It is very common to see speeds drop off some here. That was indeed the case and it's here we can begin to see the impact of QLC versus TLC. Samsung has certainly made improvements from their prior QLC drives, but the edge remains, if slightly, with competing drives.
File Transfer Test
In our file transfer test, we can see the impact of Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite capability. The drive was able to maintain a higher average speed throughout the transfer since it was operating within its buffer.
Gaming Load Times
As we've seen for some time, the difference between drives when it comes to pure load times tends to be very minimal. The key takeaway here is that any SSD will offer major improvements but if your only goal is to shave seconds from your loading screen, diminishing returns quickly set in beyond SATA (though this does vary between games and how effectively they utilize the storage bandwidth).
Results and Final Thoughts
The 870 QVO performed admirably in our testing. Samsung has clearly refined and improved what QLC is able to achieve in the mainstream computing space. I am particularly impressed at the effectiveness of the Intelligent TurboWrite functionality in being able to sustain large operations. It worked very well and gave a noticeable boost to the consistency of the speeds we were able to achieve in our file copy tests and synthetics. By and large, however, QLC still has room to grow to achieve parity.
In comparison with the drive I feel this is most competitive against, the Crucial MX500, the 870 QVO did very well when operating within its buffer, but the MX500 still retained an edge thanks to its TLC NAND. For operations outside its cache allotment, however, the 870 quickly fell behind. This is to be expected, and to some degree, from virtually all drives. Since the QVO uses QLC NAND, the impact is somewhat more severe.
Speaking in practical terms, however, you need to ask how often you would actually be exceeding that 42-78GB buffer. As a gamer and content creator, my most common use case for a high capacity drive is mass storage of games or video files. Those files “land” on the high capacity drive and rarely need to be copied off. Your use case may call for many copy/paste operations or lengthy writes, but in day to day operations it’s fair to say that, for many people, cases where that buffer will be depleted are few and far between.
Samsung has long had a hand in every sector of the SSD market, but with the QVO line-up they seem poised to open the door to larger capacities at more affordable prices. Their work on increasing endurance has very well mitigated what I, and many, have felt was the biggest drawback to the QLC NAND. That the drive also carries a 3-year warranty is also reassuring.
Yet, as I mentioned before, the value here really only starts to crystalize at higher capacities. As a consumer looking for a 1TB drive, the results we see here are close enough that it would make sense to simply choose the cheapest high-performance option. Is that the 870 QVO? At the moment, no. Samsung would benefit from saving another $10-20 from the asking price, but given their reputation, they’ve earned a bit of a brand-name premium in the marketplace.
As it stands now, this is a very solid drive that performed very well. Put simply, you’re not going to go wrong here. Samsung is making excellent progress bringing QLC NAND and high-capacity SSDs to the mainstream.
The product described in this article was provided by the manufacturer for evaluation purposes.