Samsung 870 QVO SSD Review

All books on interpersonal relations buy sildenafil 100mg will tell you that people (especially ourselves) want to be treated after detecting the reason that’s behind it. viagra doctor free The choice is basically yours as to what weight category a patient fits into. Chiropractic is tadalafil 20mg generic a holistic approach in patient care and has been shown in multiple studies to be effective. If exercising is what you relate to, there are pumps and extenders order cheap viagra http://djpaulkom.tv/dj-paul-bbq-summer-2013/ available on the market.

Samsung has been the go-to for SSDs for the better part of a decade, but with so much competition is this 870 QVO, a high capacity 2.5” SATA SSD, worth considering? How does it perform? Lets take a look, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

You’ve likely heard of Samsung’s “EVO” line of drives, but might not have seen “QVO”. The difference is the type of NAND flash they use. QVO means QLC flash, Quad-Level Cell meaning that each cell saves 4 bits. Most SSDs you’ll find right now use TLC, three bits per cell, and can have SLC or 1 bit flash, as a write cache. SLC is generally a lot faster to write to, but more expensive to manufacture, whereas QLC is cheaper to make, but less durable and slower to write to. 

That’s pretty obvious from the benchmark results, where AS SSD which I ran first, reports close to the stated spec, but once the SLC cache was filled my CrystalDiskMark and ATTO runs show terribly slow write speeds, slower than mechanical hard drives at around 80MB/s pretty much across the board. 

When showing my usual stress test of the controller, duplicating files to push read and write performance, you can see the SLC cache hasn’t been flushed despite waiting 15 minutes between my synthetic test runs and this test. It runs at 60-80MB/s which is possibly the worst result I’ve had for an SSD, taking nearly 25 minutes to copy around 90GB of data. 

I mentioned that the SLC cache is likely full, but didn’t tell you the capacity. By default, it’s just 6GB, although using it’s “intelligent Turbo Write” you can extend that by a further 36GB for this 1TB model, or 72GB for the 2 or 4TB models. That would certainly explain the slow performance, although not the slow flushing of the cache.

Samsung do try to sweeten the deal by including their Magician software, which lets you change the overprovisioning, check health and secure erase the drive. It’s a nice feature, but I’m not sure it justifies the price tag. This 1TB model currently costs £110 or so here in the UK, which while not bad for a 1TB drive, is more expensive than the Sabrent Rocket Q, an M.2, NVMe drive which also goes up to 8TB capacities but offers significantly better performance for £1 less.

I think it might be difficult to justify having a drive that gets this slow this quickly on writes, at this price point, and to make things worse remember I mentioned that QLC drives are less durable? Well, this one is too. The 1TB 860 EVO which uses TLC flash, has a 5 year, or 600TBW warranty, whereas this 1TB 870 QVO, that’s a 3 year or 360TBW warranty. That’s a pretty big difference. Now no, you probably won’t hit that any time soon, and it’s not like it will instantly fail if you do write 360TB to it, but it’s certainly something to note, especially given the price tag.

So, is this worth considering? I’m not sure. I can’t quite figure out who the target market is, considering it’s price, wear life, sharp performance drop off and the competition. While the drive itself isn’t too bad, I can’t say this gets a glowing recommendation from me as I’d personally prefer a more reliable performing drive like a standard Sabrent Rocket, or WD SN550 instead.