Samsung SSD SSD 870 QVO, SATA

Als vor knapp zwei Jahren mit der Samsung SSD 860 QVO eine der ersten QLC-SSDs den Hardwareluxx-Testparcours meisterte, war das Fazit noch sehr verhalten und wir mussten festhalten: QLC überzeugt noch nicht! Jetzt schickt Samsung die 870 QVO ins Rennen, um vieles besser zu machen und um auch mehr Speicherplatz anbieten zu können. Wie gut das funktioniert, bzw. ob sich sogar ein Umstieg lohnt, klären wir wie immer in unserem Review.

Samsungs SSD 870 QVO als zweite Generation der QLC-SSD verhält sich im Test trotz des Wechsels von Speicher und Controller kaum anders als der Vorgänger 860 QVO. Damit bleibt das Schreiben großer Datenmengen jenseits des SLC-Caches die Achillesferse – Standard-Benchmarks erfassen sie allerdings nicht.

If we look at our synthetic testing, the Samsung 870 QVO does very well. It achieves excellent results, especially when it comes to random and sequential writes. Random and sequential reads are a little bit lower than some competing drives, but the differences are small. If the review ended here, I'd definitely give the Samsung 870 QVO a recommendation, but well, it does not.

SATA III SSDs might be maxed out for maximum sequential performance, but Samsung found a way to improve Random 4K performance on the 870 QVO series and keep their SATA lineup from being stagnant!

Looking back through the numbers, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO is clearly a strong performer in its class, so a bit of a premium is justified, but there's only so much room for it to differentiate itself from other, high-quality SATA-based drives on the performance front, due to the limitations of the legacy SATA interface. Seeing how tiny the PCB is inside the drive enclosure, we suspect street prices will trend lower than the MSRP, once volume and availability ramps up. Either way, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO pushes the envelop in terms of capacity and offers competitive performance across the board. If you're in need of a capacious SATA SSD and want something from a highly-regarded back, filled with some of their latest tech, the Samsung SSD 870 QVO is worthy of consideration.

The Samsung 870 QVO represents a great option for those looking for high capacity and good performance without breaking the bank. It’s a nice progressive improvement over the prior generation drive, showing there’s still a little life left still for SATA SSDs.

The new 870 QVO is nothing new in storage and/or performance. Performance shows many similarities towards the 860 QVO, and often even a tiny notch lower. This however might be a result of a platform test setup change. So what is the 870 QVO series all about then? Well, a newly added 8TB model and paired 96-layer four bits per cell written NAND really.

The sheer capacity alone is enough to make the 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q and 8TB Samsung 870 QVO impressive and groundbreaking products. But reaching this new capacity point for consumer SSDs has required significant tradeoffs. These two drives rely on QLC NAND flash memory with worse performance and write endurance than the TLC NAND used by mainstream consumer SSDs. Thankfully, the sheer high capacity of these drives offsets some of the downsides of QLC NAND, but it but does not eliminate all of them.

The second-generation of QLC gives Samsung a way to pack more density in the same footprint. This is best highlighted by the Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SSD. Using the SATA interface, the drive can hit up to 560MB/s read and up to 530MB/s write. Users can use this massive capacity to replace aging HDD’s for a good performance boost without sacrificing capacity.