Samsung 870 QVO – up to 8TB in 2.5” SATA 6 SSD

Samsung 870 QVO

Samsung’s 870 QVO, 2.5″ SATA 6 SSD is the solution to fast mass storage at a reasonable price per GB.

But that statement contains a contradiction. It is like ‘faster, cheaper and better’ but you can only have two of the three. A correct statement is that it is Samsung 870 QV) is mass SSD storage at under 20 cents per GB, but you sacrifice some speed.

We wrote about the Samsung 870 QVO release here, and I won’t repeat that information. Our tests were to see if QLC (quad-level cell technology) V-NAND was any slower than MLC and at what point does the buffer fill up and speed drop.  

Samsung 870 QVO

Samsung 870 QVO 4TB tests

The 2, 4, and 8TB all have a dynamic cache of 78GB and a cache of 2TB/2GB, 4TB/4GB and 8TB/8GB of high-speed LPDDR4 SDRAM.The 4TB as tested should return almost the same results as the 8TB.

We sequentially copied (write) 1422 video files ranging from about 300MB to 11GB and totalling over 1TB of data to the drive.

We used a Samsung T5 2TB (USB-C 3.1 Gen 2) as the content host over USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) on an Intel NUC8. It did not matter because SATA 6 interface to the drive is 6Gbps (750MBps), and the interface is 5Gbps (625MBps).

As suspected, it started very well at 390MBps sequential write but after about 200 files (about 80GB) the buffer filled, and it dropped to 163MBps for the rest of the test.

Samsung 870 QVO

Now, this is a rugged test – very few people copy 1TB in one sitting unless backing up and then this drive is too expensive – an 8TB spinning hard disk costs less than $300 or 4 cents a GB or a 5TB external at a similar price.

Crystal disk Mark

Crystal Disk Mark returned 561/471 sequential read/write – this is as fast as SATA 6 allows. Interestingly it did extremely well in larger file sizes as well.

Samsung 870 QVO

GadgetGuy’s take – the Samsung 870 QVO is the largest and fastest SATA 6 SSD for typical use

Let get one thing straight. If you are a videographer, render high files or move 70GB at a time then NO SATA 6 SSD will do it for you. Instead, you want blazingly fast PCIe NVMe 3×4 lane like the Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD that will give you 3500/3300MBps sequential read/write speeds. These cost about 54 cents per GB!

What is typical use?

Provided you don’t do a lot of sustained >78GB read/writes this is as good as it gets.

I would replace any SATA 6 hard disk Boot drive with a 2, 4, or 8TB Samsung 870 QVO and you will notice at least a 50% boot speed improvement and similar for read/writes.

Or, if you have limited space like in an Intel NUC, it should be the drive of choice.

Upgrade or clean install

Here is our guide to a clean install of Windows or a clone install.

Samsung 870 QVO 2.5″ SATA 6 SSD Price

Website here

  • 1TB $209 – 21 cents per GB – now
  • 2TB $419 – 21 cents per GB – now
  • 4TB $839 – 21 cents per GB – August
  • 8TB $1429 – 18 cents per GB – September

Shop around online, and you may bag a bargain if you are not in a hurry to buy.

Features
Value for money
Performance
Ease of Use
Design
Reader Rating1 Vote
Positives
Biggest capacity 2.5" SATA 6 SSD
Questions about QLC V-NAND reliability more than covered by a 3-year warranty
Good for burst activity
Negatives
2, 4 and 8TB 78GB buffer will choke on large sequential writes
4.4