Samsung 860 QVO 4TB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Samsung SSD860 QVO 4TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. 4K Random Read/Write Performance8. Throughput9. PCMark 8 - Storage Consistency10. PCMark 8 - Individual Test Suites11. PCMark 8 Storage Test - Individual Test Suites12. Performance Stability13. Real Life File Testing14. Closing Thoughts15. View All Pages

When QLC NAND was first being touted it was all about capacity rather than performance, with the promise of large capacity SSDs at reasonable cost for the consumer market. So then, it was a little surprising to see that the first two consumer drives out of the block (Intel's 660p and Crucial's P1) were NVMe based drives.

Samsung's SSD 860 QVO is the first SATA based SSD to hit the market and rather than reinventing the wheel, they have based the drive on the highly successful SSD 860 format.

The drive uses Samsung’s 1TB die size, 64-layer QLC V-NAND looked after by the same Samsung MJX controller used in both the other SSD 860 drives, the 860 EVO and PRO.

In terms of performance, the Sequential read/write performance is pretty much what you would expect from a SATA 6Gb/s drive these days, with a tested read figure of 563MB/s and writes of 532MB/s – both of which are a little better than the official 550MB/s and 520MB/s for reads and writes respectively.

To boost the write performance of the drive Samsung has turned to its tried and tested Intelligent TurboWrite technology that's found in the rest of the SSD 860 family, as well as in other drives. TurboWrite assigns a chunk of the NAND to run in SLC mode to act as a fast cache. The technology uses two types of cache, one static the other dynamic. In the case of the 860 QVO, the static cache is 6GB with the dynamic part of the cache being up to 72GB in size.

Samsung has also given the drive strong encryption features as it supports AES 256-bit, TCG/Opal V2.0 and IEEE1667 technologies.

The drive is not yet available but we will update you when we can.

Pros

• Overall performance.
• Good endurance.
• Strong built in encryption.

Cons

• Only a 3-year warranty.

KitGuru says: QLC NAND flash technology points the way forward for bringing larger capacity SSD drives to the consumer space at a reasonable cost. In fact, Samsung's 4TB SSD 860 QVO is the largest capacity consumer drive we have seen to date using the technology.

 

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