Samsung SSD 870 QVO 4TB Review

1. Introduction2. Samsung SSD 870 QVC 4TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark 75. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMETER - Random 4K Performance8. Throughput9. PCMark8 Storage Test - Individual Test Suites10. PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark11. Performance Stability12. Cache Performance13. Real Life File Testing14. Closing Thoughts15. View All Pages

When 3D QLC NAND was first being touted, it was all about the promise of large-capacity SSDs at a reasonable cost for the consumer market, especially in the 2.5in format. But in the consumer space at least, take-up of the new NAND has been somewhat slow, to say the least. One company that has been waving the banner for QLC in this market segment is Samsung with firstly the SSD 860 QVO and now with their second-generation drive, the SSD 870 QVO.

The SSD 860 QVO used 64-layer QLC V-NAND whereas the new drive uses 9x layer 3D QLC V-NAND and the new denser NAND has helped Samsung introduce a new flagship drive with 8TB of capacity, double the size of the largest SSD 860 QVO. Also new in the latest drive is the MKX controller, details of which are very hard to find, but we do know it's an 8-channel chip.

In terms of performance, the Sequential read/write performance is pretty much what you would expect from a SATA 6Gb/s drive these days. Samsung quote figures of up to 560MB/s and up to 530MB/s for read & writes respectively. We could confirm those figures with the ATTO benchmark, the review drive producing 563MB/s for reads and 534MB/s for writes.

To boost the write performance of the drive Samsung has turned to its tried and tested Intelligent TurboWrite technology, a technology which made its debut in 2012. TurboWrite assigns a chunk of the NAND to run in SLC mode to act as a fast cache. The technology uses two types of cache, one pre-allocated (similar to the static TurboWrite of previous versions) and the other, dynamic or Intelligent TurboWrite. The pre-allocated cache is 6GB in size across all four drives. The 1TB drive has an Intelligent TurboWrite region of 36GB for a total of 42GB. The other three drives get a 72GB region for a total TurboWrite size of 78GB.

Samsung has also given the drive strong encryption features as it supports AES 256-bit, TCG/Opal V2.0 and IEEE1667 technologies.

UK MSRPs for the SSD 870 QVO line-up is as follows:

• 1TB £110.99
• 2TB £221.99
• 4TB £438.99
• 8TB £795.99

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• Good endurance.
• Strong built-in encryption.

Cons

• Only a 3-year warranty.

KitGuru says: Samsung continues to wave the banner for QLC (quad-level) NAND with the introduction of the SSD 870 QVO, the second generation drive using a new controller, and in particular 9x layer V-NAND which allows Samsung to produce a flagship drive that is double the capacity previous generation's flagship 4TB model.

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