Samsung 870 EVO SSD Review – Save your money…
The SATA SSD market went pretty quiet in recent years, thanks to the rise of NVMe SSDs, including Samsung’s own PCIe Gen 3 and now Gen 4 offerings too – review coming next week on the 980 Pro by the way so make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss it! But, Samsung decided now was a good time to launch a new SATA SSD. It’s called the 870 EVO, and it’s not quite as good as I’d hoped. I had some issues during testing so Samsung sent both their 500GB and 1TB drives for me to test, so lets take a look. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The new headline figures for these drives is 560MB/s on reads, and 530MB/s on writes. Not enough to set the world on fire like the new PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, but still slightly faster than the ‘last gen’ 860 EVO, one of Samsung’s, actually just one of the best selling SSDs around full stop. Sadly, Samsung decided to implement their “Intelligent TurboWrite” feature, which for the smaller 250GB and 500GB drives, means if you write a fairly small amount of data to it, the write speed drops from 530MB/s to just 300MB/s.
Intelligent TurboWrite is meant to be an amazing feature to ‘significantly accelerate write speeds’, but in reality it’s just an SLC cache and way to put big marketing figures on the box without needing the normal MLC NAND to keep up. To un-jargon that, each cell in the chip normally stores 3 bits of data, writing all three bits at a time is slower, compared to writing to just one of those bits and moving on. So, if you write one bit per cell it’ll write much faster, with the downside being you aren’t using all the space available on the drive, so it’ll have to move the bits around later. This is normally seen of 4 bit cell (QLC) drives, as QLC is much slower to write to than 2 or 3 bit NAND, making SLC, single bit, caching pretty reasonable. You don’t often see it on 3 bit NAND like these drives.
That would be fine, if the SLC cache was large enough. In some drives I’ve tested it can be over half their capacity, some are more like 10%, but this? Not even 5%. This 500GB drive has just 4GB of ‘Default’ space reserved for caching, and a further 18GB of ‘intelligent’ space making for 22GB in total. That means if you write 22GB of data to the drive in one go, like copying a game over for example, the performance drops from 530MB/s, to just 300MB/s. Now that is still faster than a mechanical hard drive, but it’s hardly what’s promised on the box. Happily, the larger capacity drives, like this 1TB one, don’t actually slow down once the cache is full, so it’s not as big a deal.
That’s all in theory though, what about in practice? Well, starting with the 500GB drive, it can hit its advertised speeds with CrystalDiskMark, although struggles to even in ATTO, something that normally would match fairly closely. Either way, it’s consistent across the full range of block sizes, sitting at a healthy 530-540MB/s on reads and 510MB/s on writes. The 1TB is almost identical, except for a slightly higher 4K-64 Thread result in AS SSD.
When it comes to my file duplication test, stressing the controllers read and write capabilities simultaneously, they did alright if not amazing. The fastest I’d expect them to run is around 250-300MB/s, and despite the small cache size on the 500GB drive, since it wasn’t copying at anywhere near full speed, it didn’t see much of a slow down at all – neither did the 1TB drive.
In summary, these drives aren’t bad. If you end up with one, I’m sure they’ll serve you well and be a decent experience to use. But, if you have the choice, I wouldn’t buy one. There are other options, including at least while it’s still in stock, the 860 EVO, and other brands like WD’s Blue SATA SSD that offers similar performance without any caching pains. For so long Samsung was the go-to for SSDs, but I fear taking their lead for granted, and trying to maximise profits, has led to them offering a drive that’s no longer market leading.
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TechteamGB Score
