The Samsung 870 QVO (1TB & 4TB) SSD Review: QLC Refreshed

A yr and a half in the past, Samsung launched the primary shopper SATA SSDs to make use of QLC NAND flash reminiscence, squeezing an additional bit into every reminiscence cell, yielding the 860 QVO to affix the prevailing lineup of 860 EVO and PRO. Samsung’s second-generation QLC NAND is now prepared, and the 870 QVO is the primary 870 mannequin to be launched.

The business put numerous effort into getting ready for the arrival of QLC NAND: beefing up error correction to compensate for decrease write endurance, and tuning cache algorithms on shopper drives to forestall coping with decrease efficiency after SLC caches run out. But regardless of all of the work it took to make QLC SSDs viable, they have not made a lot of a splash and undoubtedly aren’t displacing TLC from the market but.

The new Samsung 870 QVO SSDs arrive right into a market panorama that does not look all that totally different to what the 860 QVO confronted on the finish of 2018. Samsung is not the one model promoting shopper SATA SSDs with QLC NAND, however it’s not an enormous membership. Most of the opposite QLC SATA drives are so low-end that the producers will not decide to utilizing any specific reminiscence inside, they usually’re utilizing no matter is least expensive for the time being. Some months, there’s extra to be saved by going with a DRAMless controller and TLC NAND that fell off the again of a truck, relatively than utilizing Samsung’s technique of pairing theoretically cheaper QLC NAND with a stable controller.

QLC NAND has had a bit extra of an affect within the NVMe SSD market, the place just a few extra manufacturers are experimenting with utilizing QLC to make huge drives cheaper, relatively than merely making low-cost drives even cheaper. That’s the identical objective that Samsung had for the 860 QVO and now the 870 QVO: bringing multi-TB SSDs into the mainstream. Samsung’s most seen contribution to that objective would be the introduction of the primary 8TB shopper SATA SSD: the 8TB 870 QVO. That mannequin is because of arrive a bit bit later in August, and we do not have a pattern but. Today, we’re wanting on the 1TB and 4TB capacities of the 870 QVO.

Samsung MKX controller and LPDDR4 DRAM

The Samsung 870 QVO is an incremental replace to the 860 QVO. The QLC NAND has been up to date from Samsung’s 64-layer V-NAND to their 92-layer V-NAND. For their NVMe product line, this transformation produced the 970 EVO Plus as a successor to the 970 EVO with out even updating the controller, and the 970 PRO did not get up to date in any respect. The 870 QVO does carry a controller replace, changing the MJX with the MKX in Samsung’s lengthy line of SATA SSD controllers. Samsung hasn’t disclosed any specific enhancements to their controller or firmware structure, and we suspect this iteration is a extra minor replace than the final one. We know that the older MJX controller was already able to supporting 8TB drive capacities, in order that wasn’t the driving drive for this controller replace.