Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SSD Review and Test

Due to their compact size and speed performance, the popularity of NVMe drives is steadily growing, but SATA SSDs also have undeniable advantages – price and capacity. Given the demand for such solid state drives, manufacturers continue to update their lineups, making some improvements compared to older solutions. For example, Samsung’s popular EVO line of hard drives was already updated earlier this year, while the more affordable QVO got it a year ago. We have already considered a representative with QLC flash memory, now let’s get acquainted with the older model.

Samsung 870 EVO

The 870 EVO drives are based on the new Samsung MKX controller, familiar to us from the 870 QVO series, and are equipped with proprietary 128-layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC flash memory, known as TLC. Linear read/write speeds have slightly increased relative to the predecessor 860 EVO and now amount to 560/530 MB/s, respectively. But in terms of capacity, no changes have occurred – the SSD range has devices ranging from 250 GB to 4 TB. All of them, of course, are equipped with a SATA interface.

To speed up writing, new items have SLC caching technology, the so-called Turbo Write, which implies the allocation of physical and dynamic flash memory for this purpose. The total amount of SLC cache is 12GB and 22GB for the 250GB and 500GB models respectively, 42GB for the 1TB solution, and 78GB for the 2TB and 4TB devices. Naturally, for recording large amounts of data at a time, the older representatives of the 870 EVO are best suited.

In addition, the drives have an LPDDR4-based buffer, the capacity of which, depending on the model, ranges from 512 MB to 4 GB. It is gratifying that the Korean giant has not simplified the new series for the sake of cheaper prices, as other manufacturers do. That didn’t stop Samsung from releasing the 980 line without a buffer, though.

The warranty period for 870 EVO solutions is 5 years or 150-2400 TB total bytes written, depending on the model. The predecessors could boast of similar indicators.

Samsung 870 EVO 1TB

In this article, we will consider a 1 TB model. The drive comes in a small branded box with an SSD on the front.

Inside, the drive is protected by a plastic tray, which also contains instructions and a warranty card.

Externally, the SSD looks similar to other Samsung SATA devices, which differ only in the color scheme of the case and the corporate square under the company logo. In this case, we have a combination of black and gray. It is also worth noting that the drives of the Korean giant are one of the few that, in vertical orientation, have connectors on the right side, which will be appreciated, for example, by users of NZXT cases. On the back there is a sticker with the model, production date, serial number and other information.

The case is made of aluminum alloy and consists of two halves; there are no thermal pads for heat transfer from the controller.

Inside there is a small board with soldered S4LR059 controller, K4F8E164HM-BGCJ one gigabyte LPDDR4-1866 drum buffer and K9DVGY8J5B-DCK0 flash memory chip.

Once the SSD is detected in the operating system and formatted using Windows with default settings, 931 GB of free space will be available.

For users of Samsung drives, the company offers a couple of proprietary utilities. With Data Migration, you can clone an old SSD, either completely or selectively by partition.

The second utility, Magician, allows you to get information about the drive and view it SMART.

You can also perform quick testing, optimize the disk, or enable proprietary Rapid technology, which allows you to cache requests to the drive in the PC’s RAM.

It is possible to manually set an additional amount of free space to reduce cell wear.

The utility also contains encryption options, and if necessary, you can completely erase the entire contents of the disk using a prepared USB drive.