Samsung SSD 870 QVO 4TB Review

The Samsung SSD 870 QVO 4TB ships in a compact black box with an image of the drive on the front, along with information about the drive – including the fact that it uses V-NAND, is a 2.5in drive and its Sequential read/write performance figures. There is also a sticker on the top left of the box which indicates the capacity of the drive.

The rear of the box points out the fact the drive comes with a 3-year limited warranty and has a multilingual list with links to where to find more warranty information.

The drive sits in a tray to keep it secure during transit, and the only other thing in the box is an installation/warranty guide that sits on top of it.

The drive is built on the standard 2.5in format and has a metal enclosure held in place by three pentalobe screws, two of which are hidden under the label on the rear of the drive. Be warned, ripping off the label to get at the screws will void the drive’s warranty.

Two 1TB 9x layer NAND packages (coded K9XVGB8JJA) occupy one side of the PCB along with the new Samsung MKX (S4LR059) 8-channel controller and the 4GB LPDDR4 cache IC. On the other side of the PCB we find another two NAND packages.

Samsung’s SSD management utility goes by the name of Magician and can be downloaded from Samsung’s website. It regularly gets refreshed and updated. The latest version (at the time of writing is 6.1.0).

Magician allows you to do most maintenance jobs you may need to do with an SSD; updating firmware, optimise performance, adjust the Over Provisioning, enable data security (the drive supports AES 256-bit full-disk encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, and Encrypted Drive -IEEE1667 (MS eDrive ) ) and securely erase the drive. Magician also features a built-in benchmark tool.

The one thing missing from Magician is any form of integrated data migration tool but you can download a separate data migration tool from Samsung’s website.

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