QLC NAND has had a bit more of an impact in the NVMe SSD market, where a couple of more brand names are try out using QLC to make huge drives more affordable, instead of simply making cheap drives even more affordable. Thats the exact same objective that Samsung had for the 860 QVO and now the 870 QVO: bringing multi-TB SSDs into the mainstream. Samsungs many noticeable contribution to that goal will be the intro of the first 8TB customer SATA SSD: the 8TB 870 QVO. That design is due to arrive a little bit later in August, and we do not have a sample. Today, were looking at the 1TB and 4TB capacities of the 870 QVO.
The new Samsung 870 QVO SSDs get here into a market landscape that does not look all that different to what the 860 QVO dealt with at the end of 2018. Samsung is no longer the only brand selling customer SATA SSDs with QLC NAND, however its not a huge club.
The market put a great deal of effort into getting ready for the arrival of QLC NAND: boosting error correction to make up for lower compose endurance, and tuning cache algorithms on customer drives to avert handling lower efficiency after SLC caches go out. In spite of all the work it took to make QLC SSDs practical, they havent made much of a splash and definitely arent displacing TLC from the market.
A half and a year earlier, Samsung presented the first consumer SATA SSDs to utilize QLC NAND flash memory, squeezing an additional bit into each memory cell, yielding the 860 QVO to sign up with the current lineup of 860 EVO and PRO. Samsungs second-generation QLC NAND is now prepared, and the 870 QVO is the first 870 model to be released.
Samsung MKX controller and LPDDR4 DRAM
The Samsung 870 QVO is an incremental update to the 860 QVO. The QLC NAND has been updated from Samsungs 64-layer V-NAND to their 92-layer V-NAND. For their NVMe line of product, this modification produced the 970 EVO Plus as a successor to the 970 EVO without even updating the controller, and the 970 PRO didnt get updated at all. The 870 QVO does bring a controller update, replacing the MJX with the MKX in Samsungs long line of SATA SSD controllers. Samsung hasnt disclosed any specific improvements to their controller or firmware architecture, and we believe this model is a more small update than the last one. We understand that the older MJX controller was currently capable of supporting 8TB drive capacities, so that wasnt the driving force for this controller upgrade.
Samsung 870 QVO Specifications
Chipset.
Intel C232.
The brand-new Samsung 870 QVO SSDs show up into a market landscape that doesnt look all that different to what the 860 QVO faced at the end of 2018. Thats the same goal that Samsung had for the 860 QVO and now the 870 QVO: bringing multi-TB SSDs into the mainstream. The Samsung 870 QVO is an incremental upgrade to the 860 QVO. Initial MSRPs for the 870 QVO are reduced from what the 860 QVO debuted at, with $50 off the 2TB and $100 off the 4TB. That merely puts the 870 QVOs launch MSRP on par with the existing street rates for the 860 QVO.
Consecutive Read
560 MB/s
PowerConsumption.
Read.
2.1 W.
2.1 W.
2.2 W.
2.4 W.
Write.
2.2 W.
3.0 W.
3.2 W.
3.3 W.
Graphics.
AMD Radeon HD 5450, 1920×1200@60Hz.
Spectre/Meltdown microcode and OS spots current since May 2018.
QD32.
88k (SLC) 22k (QLC).
88k (SLC) 42k (QLC).
AnandTech 2018 Consumer SSD Testbed.
In such a way, thats great for this evaluation, since the 870 QVO does not have much direct competition in the type of other big QLC SATA drives. The majority of the SSDs that are substantially less expensive than the 860/870 QVOs are DRAMless SSDs, usually TLC however periodically QLC. The cheapest entry-level NVMe SSDs are all either DRAMless with TLC, or utilize QLC with a more traditional controller.
Guarantee.
3 years.
RandomReadIOPS (4kB).
QD1.
11k (SLC) 5k (QLC).
11k (SLC) 5k (QLC).
Samsungs guarantee for the 870 QVO is 0.3 drive writes daily for 3 years. This is comparable to numerous low-end customer TLC drives and a step up from the majority of other consumer QLC drives that are rated for 0.1 to 0.15 DWPD (in some cases over a 5-year service warranty duration, but thats still fewer total composes than the 870 QVO is ranked for).
SequentialWrite
SLC
530 MB/s
The 870 QVO line of product still begins at 1TB, the minimum size needed to put 8 controller channels to work when utilizing 1024Gbit NAND dies. That smallest capability model features some significant efficiency deficits relative to the multi-TB models, in much the same style as 256GB TLC drives fall behind their larger equivalents, or 512GB capacities for high-performance NVMe SSDs. The most notable limitations of the 1TB 870 QVO are the post-cache write speed of 80 MB/s compared to 160 MB/s, and the cache size that is almost cut in half. Together that implies the 1TB model is more at danger of showing undesirable performance when the SLC compose cache runs out, however at 42GB this models cache can still handle more writes than many users perform in an entire day of desktop use.
NAND Flash
Samsung 1Tbit 92L 3D QLC
.
Software.
Windows 10 x64, variation 1709.
RandomWriteIOPS (4kB).
QD1.
35k (SLC) 22k (QLC).
35k (SLC) 34k (QLC).
Linux kernel variation 4.14, fio version 3.6.
Kind Factor
2.5″ 7mm SATA
MSRP.
$ 129.99( 13 cents/ GB).
$ 249.99( 12 cents/ GB).
$ 499.99( 12 cents/ GB).
TBA.
The 870 QVOs immediate predecessor, the 860 QVO.
Samsung continues to provide more comprehensive performance specifications than any other customer SSD vendor. The huge top-line numbers that everyone reports are barely worth discussing for a SATA drive; nearly any drive can saturate the 6Gbps user interface under perfect conditions, with sequential or random reads or writes at a high sufficient line depth. Samsung goes the extra mile to offer specs for performance at queue depth 1, and efficiency after the SLC cache goes out. A few of those numbers look pretty harsh: sequential write speeds dropping to a simple 80MB/s for the 1TB model, and even random reads are considerably slower when accessing QLC data instead of the SLC cache. However in general, these specs are extremely similar to the 860 QVO. Random write performance at QD1 appears to have actually taken a little bit of a hit, however all over else performance for the 870 QVO is ranked to be equal or slightly much better than its predecessor.
Initial MSRPs for the 870 QVO are lowered from what the 860 QVO debuted at, with $50 off the 2TB and $100 off the 4TB. That simply puts the 870 QVOs launch MSRP on par with the existing street prices for the 860 QVO. And due to the fact that its Samsung, the rates isnt low enough to rule out comparing against mainstream TLC SATA SSDs and entry-level NVMe SSDs, specifically for the lower capabilities.
DevSlp.
3 mW.
4 mW.
7 mW.
10 mW.
For this evaluation, we are comparing the 870 QVO versus the following:.
We dont have any non-Samsung 4TB consumer SSDs to compare versus; the Western Digital Blue is practically the only other 4TB customer SATA SSD, and Sabrents Phison E12-based Rocket and Rocket Q drives are the current options on the NVMe side. The rest of the 4+ TB SSD options are enterprise drives that lack SLC caching and idle power management and are way more costly than anything else this review is taking a look at.
Idle.
30 mW.
30 mW.
35 mW.
45 mW.
Capability
1 TB
2 TB
4 TB
8 TB
Motherboard.
ASRock Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC.
The ADATA Ultimate SU750 and Patriot P200, 2 different DRAMless TLC SATA drives. The SU750 uses a Realtek controller and the 2TB P200 used a Maxio controller, both spending plan choices.
The Crucial MX500 and Samsung 860 EVO as traditional SATA SSDs with TLC NAND. The MX500 has always been one of the most economical mainstream SATA SSDs from a major brand, and the 860 EVO usually marks the most it makes sense to pay for SATA SSDs– any more, and the cash would be much better invested in a good NVMe SSD.
The Intel 660p: among the handful of QLC NVMe SSDs on the market. The 660p is being replaced by the newer 665p but both are still extensively offered. Although the 665p is a bit faster, the 660p still has no difficulty running circle SATA drives under the best conditions.
Representing the disk drive market, we have a Western Digital WD Red 4TB, the pre-SMR WD40EFRX model. Its the most recent and largest difficult drive I have on hand, because my home office has actually been drowning in SSDs for several years. (A nice issue to have.)
Memory.
4x 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR4-2400 CL15.
LPDDR4 DRAM
1 GB
2 GB
4 GB
8 GB
QLC
80 MB/s
160 MB/s
Write Endurance.
360 TB0.3 DWPD.
720 TB0.3 DWPD.
1440 TB0.3 DWPD.
2880 TB0.3 DWPD.
Ultimately, many of the competition versus multi-TB SSDs originates from hard disk drives, the incumbent options for high-capacity drives. Multi-TB hard disk drives are still vastly more affordable than multi-TB SSDs, but for numerous consumers the huge question posed by drives like the 870 QVO is whether its affordable yet to move all their storage over to solid-state. That doesnt necessarily need SSDs to match difficult drives on a $/ GB basis, due to the fact that there are lots of advantages to SSDs that are worth paying a minimum of a bit additional for.
CPU.
Intel Xeon E3 1240 v5.
Controller
Samsung MKX
QD32.
98k (SLC) 45k (QLC).
98k (SLC) 74k (QLC).
Max SLC Cache Size
42 GB
78 GB
78 GB
78 GB
