Samsung 870 QVO 4TB Flash QLC Flash Memory Review and Test

Despite the fact that the computer industry is developing by leaps and bounds, mechanical components, for the most part, remain an integral part of it. And although the active cooling system does not yet have alternatives for powerful PCs and laptops, hard disk drives still received a worthy replacement in the form of an SSD. But the availability of high-capacity drives, until recently, left much to be desired, both in terms of availability and price, and in the end it was necessary to combine two types of storage devices: use an SSD for the OS and speed-demanding data, and for everything else – a cheaper one. HDD. With the release of the next type of flash memory, the volumes of solid-state drives grew, and prices fell, as did the cell recording resource, but not so critically, which made it possible to increase the SSD capacity to an acceptable comfortable level. The desire to completely get rid of the mechanical assistant became possible only recently, and with the advent of solutions based on QLC chips, this possibility promised to be relatively inexpensive. But something went wrong and the new products did not differ much in price from TLC-based products.

With the introduction of 4-bit memory, Samsung introduced a new budget series of its 860 QVO drives, which was supposed to be a cheap alternative to solutions with TLC memory. Based on the Samsung MJX controller, on which the 860 EVO solid state drives were produced, this series really had a more humane price tag compared to products from famous brands. But progress does not stand still, and it’s time to update the lineup – the company last year launched the 870 QVO line on the new MKX controller and 92-layer QLC flash memory, which can offer users even more capacity and for less money.

Samsung 870 QVO

The updated QVO series contains four models with capacities from 1 to 8 TB, while the previous one could offer 4 TB drives maximum. The speeds have grown a little – now they are 560 and 530 MB / s for reading and writing, respectively. But the manufacturer immediately warns that such speeds will be available with SLC caching (the proprietary Intelligent TurboWrite algorithm), after which they will drop to 80 MB / s when writing for a 1 TB model and 160 MB / s for 2-8 terabyte drives. The same applies to working with blocks of 4 KB – IOPS will be reduced after overcoming the speed zone of the drive, which is 78 GB (for the youngest model, this amount is half as much). In principle, very good performance for a device on QLC-memory. With a half-full drive, users will always see maximum speeds when copying small files, which is a standard task in the consumer segment, while copying a couple of terabytes of information to disk is already an extremely rare occurrence.

The entire 870 QVO line is based on the new Samsung MKX controller, on which, moreover, the 870 EVO series drives were introduced recently, and proprietary 92-layer V-NAND 4-bit MLC flash memory. Such an interpretation of QLC in the interpretation of the Korean giant can mislead an inexperienced user, and here you will have to navigate by series of drives. Although, this did not prevent the company in the latest 980 PRO from using TLC memory instead of the usual MLC. As a buffer, the 870 QVO uses LPDDR4 chips of 1 GB per terabyte of storage capacity, which looks good against the backdrop of a general transition to bufferless models, not only in the SATA segment.

The warranty period for all devices in the line is 3 years or until their resource is exhausted (whichever happens first), and this is from 360 TB for the younger model to 2880 TB for the older one. In fact, if you rewrite the drive every day, it will “exhaust” itself in a year. But in reality, such a situation is extremely rare, and TBW is just a guaranteed indicator. For example, when testing an SSD, we easily use about 10 of its volumes, although for everyday tasks so much will be overwritten within six months, or even more.

Samsung 870 QVO 4TB

We got a 4 TB drive for testing. It comes in a medium-sized black box with an image of the SSD itself on the front side.

The drive is additionally protected by a plastic tray. Inside the package, the user will also find instructions and a warranty card.

Externally, the SSD enclosure is no different from other SATA solutions, but the corporate design makes it clear who its manufacturer is. Despite the low cost of the QVO series, the body is made of aluminum, not plastic, like some second-tier companies.

It is worth noting that Samsung is one of the few manufacturers that produces drives with SATA connector orientation on the right side of the device, which will be relevant, for example, for owners of NZXT cases who want to install an SSD for everyone to see.

After determining the drive in the operating system and formatting it with default settings, the user will have 3.63 TB of free space available.

Samsung also offers owners of its SSDs to download proprietary Data Migration and Magician utilities from the manufacturer’s website. The first allows you to painlessly transfer all data from an old drive to a new one by cloning the entire drive or some partitions.

The second allows you to get general information about the installed device, monitor the solid state drive or update its firmware.

Magician allows you to view SMART and test the drive. Naturally, testing is carried out quickly and affects the SLC area.

If you suspect problems with the SSD, the utility can scan the cells or optimize the disk. To speed up the storage subsystem, you can enable proprietary Rapid technology, which allows you to cache requests to the drive in the PC’s RAM.

In addition, you can manually allocate additional free space to reduce cell wear.

You can also manage encryption options or perform a full erase of the entire contents of the disk using a USB drive.