Samsung SSD 870 QVO Review: Fast Speeds Meet High Capacity at an Affordable Price

Solid State Drive or SSD storage is being widely adopted today for its fast read and write speeds as opposed to hard disk drives. However, when it comes to large storage needs, a lot of users continue to rely on the good old HDD. As of today, you can get up to 16-terabytes worth of storage in a single consumer-grade hard drive. Things are different when it comes to SSDs, but it is surely catching up.

The maximum amount of storage that you usually see on SSDs in the market today is about 1TB to 2TB. Samsung however is trying its best to push the limits with its 870 QVO range of SSDs. The company offers it with up to 8TB of storage, which is probably the most amount you will find on a standard SATA-based consumer-grade SSD. Now, 8TB is a lot, and unless you are a content creator or a professional videographer, you might not need that kind of storage. That is probably the reason why we haven’t seen Samsung launching large-capacity SSDs in the market, and it makes sense.

The 870 QVO is an update to the 860 QVO and continues to focus on a budget price point like the previous generation. Now usually if you increase the storage capacity per unit, it should theoretically lead to a reduction in read and write speeds. However, Samsung claims speeds that are as good (if not better) as most competitive brands in the market. In fact it offers slightly better speeds than Samsung’s 860 PRO and 860 EVO range on paper.

Now in terms of the design, the SSD comes with a familiar clean look with a metal casing. To differentiate from Samsung’s other offerings, the QVO range comes in a grey finish rather than black. You get standard SATA power and data connectors but sadly Samsung doesn’t offer any mounting bracket. So in case your cabinet only offers 3.5mm storage bays, you’ll have to buy one separately.

Hooking up the drive was pretty simple and I fired it up with a quick format and some file transfer tests. I was sent the 1TB model and I was able to transfer a 4.2GB file in about 25 seconds when copying from a standard 7,200-rpm hard drive at an average of 165MBps. The same file took just 5 seconds transferring from a Samsung 860 EVO at 450MBps. Transferring a folder with 455 files having a total size of 4.5GB took 30 seconds from the hard-drive at 130MBps average speeds and about 10 seconds from the 860 EVO at 420MBps. These are pretty good results and should completely bring a boost to your overall PC performance.

I further tested the drive with CrystalDiskMark ATTO Disk benchmark. The drive was able to score 562MBps sequential read speeds, and 532MBps sequential write speeds on CrystalDiskMark. On ATTO, the drive peaked at 537MBps read speeds and 509MBps peak write speeds.

Samsung has not only managed to finally introduce an SSD that offers up to 8TB of storage, it has managed to provide fast speeds as well. This time it features a 9x-layer production process which allows for more storage in the same amount of NAND module space. Also, it continues to offer QLC quad-level-cell storage that basically stacks four bits of information per memory cell to save on costs, but that usually comes with a compromise of slower read and write speeds. The company has managed to tackle this issue by adding a single-layer-cell (SLC) buffer into the drive. Samsung calls this Intelligent TurboWrite which definitely helps in maintaining faster speeds when compared to other drives that don’t offer QLC based storage.

All of this jargon might be getting a little complicated, but in short, Samsung has managed to store more data in the same amount of space, and at the same time offers respectable fast speeds, if not the fastest. On top of that, the range is not exuberantly priced. The drive is available starting at Rs 9,999 for the 1TB variant. This puts it at par with most 2.5-inch SSD drives on the market, and relatively cheaper than its own EVO and PRO range. Of course, if you are aiming for that 8TB version, it is going to set you back at Rs 74,999!

Samsung 870 QVO then is a recommended upgrade for you if you are still running your PC on a hard drive, or just want a large and fast secondary internal drive to store large amounts of data. I would also recommend this to someone planning to upgrade the entire motherboard just to gain the ability to install a PCIe based M.2 SSD. There are faster drives on the market, and if speed is your highest priority, look elsewhere.